Kōrero: Epidemics

During a polio epidemic in 1948, schools closed to prevent the disease spreading. This cartoon shows a busy mother trying to do the housework and mind the baby while supervising her older children’s studies.

While healthy children appreciated time off school, those who caught polio could not enjoy the extended holiday. Listen to this recording of a woman remembering her visit to a school friend with polio who spent most of her time in an iron lung – some polio victims could only breathe with the aid of this machine.

Transcript

There was a girl who had been in my form in Timaru who actually had gone down with polio and we were sort of rostered to go and visit her in hospital and that was the first time I'd ever seen anybody in an iron lung and it was really quiet frightening to see this great big metal circular thing you know for a body sitting in or lying in there and this pump just going continually, you could hear the air being pushed in out. And I don't really know how long she lasted in that and she got to the stage where she could come out for a two or three hours at a time but she spent most of her life and she actually learned to type with a pencil in her mouth or a something in her mouth and they rigged up a typewriter for her. So she used to do a lot of her lessons through typing.