At age ten, I received what I believed to be a veterinary-size dose of gamma globulin in each buttock and passed out cold in the doctor’s waiting room. A polio epidemic had taken down a boy in an adjacent block of our neighborhood. Some lady hollered at us to get out of the river we played in or we would get sick and die and my parents were taking no chances.

A couple years later as a newspaper carrier I plopped on people’s porches an edition headlining Dr. Jonas Salk’s discovery of an injectable polio vaccine. More shots. Smaller. This time everyone I knew got them, waiting in linoleum-floored rooms with old magazines all over town.

I saw only two cases of polio in my practice, one in an unvaccinated adult, the other in a recently vaccinated child. Diagnosed the first, missed the second. Never saw a case in training, had to look it up. I checked out a possible third case with an elderly pediatrician. He had finished his hospital rounds and was putting on his coat to go home. He assured me that from the history it wasn’t polio. What the child had, he couldn’t say, but “It’s not polio.” He had seen hundreds of cases of real polio.

It was a relief to hear. You can only get so much from books.

In Medical Humanities 35, 2, 2009