CHARNEY HALL Medical Matters

The Injection

I can’t recall when and I can’t remember how I found myself one ill fated day, standing at the end of a queue outside Matron’s office, located mid-way down the first floor corridor. 

My fear of needles has never really left me to this day and in the 1950s the sugar lump had not been invented and so, to my horror, we were to be given our first shot of anti-polio vaccine by injection into the upper arm.

With the cold steel of needles came the smell of cotton wool soaked in antiseptic spirits and kidney shaped stainless steel trays.

Dr Jonas Salk, an American, was responsible for developing the vaccine and the torture that went with it but we were told that he was an eminent scientist and the procedure was perfectly safe. What we did know was that it was better than catching that terrible disease in the local swimming pool*. 

The government of the day were also culpable as they had decreed that all children should be vaccinated in an attempt to eliminate the dreadful effects of contracting poliomyelitis which, in those days, resulted in some children having to wear metal callipers for the rest of their lives. There were no ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’ - you had to have it.

So like lambs to the slaughter we lined up, moving slowly down the shiny brown linoleum covered corridor, ever closer to the open office door where, once reached, we caught sight of our fate. 

Matron, Nurse Goodwin, had piercing beady eyes and wore spectacles. She was immaculately dressed in full regalia - white starched hat secured with hairpins to her ‘salt and pepper’ hair and pressed royal blue nurse’s uniform, white starched apron with tightened belt and lapel watch. Barbara Duncan was in attendance, probably with clipboard, ticking off names and recording the day’s gruesome progress.

Nurse Goodwin

The real Nurse Goodwin!

A typical syringe of the time

We were told to pull our trousers and underpants down and ordered to cough. The expression on Matron’s face did not change….I couldn’t quite work out the connection between exhaling a lung full of air and what was to come next…

The needle was long and blunt and the syringe, all chromed with calibrated glass vial through which I caught sight of the serum, was large.

Matron’s movements had become robotic. The boy in front of me stepped forward, raised his shirt sleeve, Matron swabbed the target, lifted the syringe vertically and squirted serum into the air and straightway plunged the needle deep into the muscle....not a sound....my turn.... I turned away at the moment of penetration, praying that matron would not slip with the needle and pump more of that liquid into my arm than was strictly necessary....’next boy please’....

The needle hurt and the vaccine stung but the whole procedure, much to my intense relief, was over in a few seconds - and miraculously I did not faint. 

However my joy seemed short lived because thereafter (or was it years later?) a tuberculin test with a fiendish multi pronged plunger, to be applied to the wrist, was on the cards. And worst still, if you reacted to the test, a subcutaneous inoculation which would eventually erupt like a festering boil and leave a life-long scar on the upper arm. 

That sounded intolerable.

*
https://www.biography.com/scientist/jonas-salk