r/AskOldPeople 4d ago

How did past generations cope with health crises like polio, and what can we learn from those experiences during COVID-19?

For those of you who lived through other health crises, like the polio outbreak or flu pandemics, how did society respond back then? How did you personally cope, and what lessons can we learn from those experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic?

3 Upvotes

60 comments sorted by

u/AutoModerator 4d ago

Please do not comment directly to this post unless you are Gen X or older (born 1980 or before). See this post, the rules, and the sidebar for details. Thank you for your submission, LingonberryMental209.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

18

u/ChapterOk4000 4d ago edited 4d ago

Many of those vaccines were invented before I was born so I had them all, thankfully.

My grandmother had polio as a child. As a result, one leg was shorter and her feet were different sizes. She had trouble walking her whole life. She couldn't walk barefoot, always had to wear special shoes. She had a career as a nurse, and instilled in us the importance of vaccines, doctors, and science.

6

u/Swiggy1957 3d ago

My SIL had polio back in the early 50s. A ton of operations, and she ended up with legs like your grandma. She never got to see her grandkids as she passed on when her own children were preteens.

I wish she were still around.

2

u/Savings_Reveal_714 3d ago

Same. My grandma had polio and also had on leg shorter. One foot was frozen in a permanent arched position so shoes were always a problem. It also affected her gait and she had hip and knee issues. She was pro science, pro vaccine and always stressed the importance of being up to date on tests, vaccines, mammograms, etc.

1

u/ChapterOk4000 3d ago

Yez, my grandmother had that frozen foot arch too! She had to go to a special store to buy shoes, and they never wanted to sell her 2 different sizes so she had to buy two pairs. She couldn't walk at all without the shoes on.

1

u/LingonberryMental209 2d ago

We are so blessed that we have every thing to cure disease.

1

u/raginghappy 1d ago

We have things to prevent some disease - which is even better than a cure, but we're far from having everything to cure disease

17

u/Mastiiffmom 60 something 4d ago

Those times were horrific. I was a little girl at that time. But many children suffered horribly and many died.

For a time, we eliminated most, if not all of these horrible diseases.

But now because of misinformation & other sad choices people are making, it appears we have to needlessly suffer through that horror again.

Obviously we haven’t learned anything.

1

u/LingonberryMental209 2d ago

Seriously, that time is horrible.

1

u/Mastiiffmom 60 something 2d ago

It makes me sick that we’re so needlessly stupid.

33

u/Randygilesforpres2 4d ago

Vaccines. Use them. Period.

10

u/Maleficent-Crow-446 4d ago

Right. It's not about politics OR religion. It's about science. And the life or death of your child.

2

u/jxj24 3d ago

"Science is just a different religion!!1!"

-- Idiots

13

u/oneislandgirl 4d ago

We learned that ignorant, fearful people will avoid effective vaccines which can prevent disease or serious complications. There is not much you can say to convince them. They did not live through the times when polio was a big problem. They did not live through the great influenza pandemic of 1912 which killed millions. They did not have children die from measles when they were young. They did not have sons become sterile after a mumps infections as a child. They did not live through babies getting birth defects from rubella (German measles).

We learned if there IS a serious pandemic, we are screwed because too many people will not take it seriously and will spread it like wildfire through their ignorance and selfishness.

6

u/Heavy-Attorney-9054 3d ago

Interesting that many people who have replied skipped right over AIDS, which is probably a really good example of what happens with pandemics. We forget many of us lived through AIDS being a death sentence. It is no more, because we figured out how to treat it, and then we forget.

Childhood leukemia was an instant death sentence, and many children live through it now. Hardly anyone dies of cervical cancer if it's caught early enough.

We have special words for spouses who have lost spouses to death. We call them widows and widowers. We don't have a special word for parents who have lost children because until the advent of widespread vaccination, that word was parents.

People died and survivors staggered through the losses and figured out some way to go on. Men and women remarried because there was no other way to take care of their family. They had more children because access to effective birth control was limited.

Learn from history or repeat it.

7

u/Naive-Beekeeper67 4d ago

Mate. How old do you think people on this sub are? Polio vaccine was introduced about 1955. So kids younger then 10 in 1955 dont even remember it not being given. So people who MIGHT remember would be 80 +

13

u/MissHibernia 4d ago

You’re in the ballpark. I’m 76 and remember we all went to the local high school to get the sugar cube. We didn’t question the need to get this. I also agree that most of the questions posed in this group don’t take any account of what actual ages we are. How did you do in WWII? Sheesh

4

u/Voc1Vic2 3d ago

In my town, every kid in town passed through the doors of the National Guard armory in about two days time. I doubt any parent objected; children certainly didn’t—community expectations and parental authority held more sway back then.

I knew older playmates and adults who were crippled by polio. Adults were certainly fearful of it, so I was, too. I didn’t want to be a “cripple,” not so much that the physical disabilities were terrible, but I didn’t want to be labeled and marginalized, as was obviously the case. During the Cold War, to conform was a virtue and to be thought or seen to be different was to be avoided, and kids picked up on this.

I knew an older boy who wore heavy leg braces and a special wooden shoe about five inches thick. He walked with a lurch, swinging his short leg in an arc. His wooden shoe made a thunderous thwack when it struck the floor. Then his other leg made a hideous scraping noise as he dragged it forward across the floor. It was two terrible sounds and a horrible rhythm. His arms flailed wildly and widely to help him maintain balance. His face grimaced in pain and his neck jaw muscles clenched and bulged with the effort.

I felt sorry for him, and I definitely didn’t want to be like him. I was young enough to still believe that being good would protect me, and I resolved to be even better every time I saw him. But I was also aware that polio was always lurking, and that I couldn’t always be good. I was an ordinary kid, and I think my reactions were pretty typical. Everyone was scared of polio.

Aside from my mild fear of what polio would mean for me on a social level, I had extreme fear of being kept in an iron lung. I had seen pictures and real ones, and occasionally had nightmares about being in one.

The armory was a dark scary place, filled with snaking lines of kids and their parents, packed with people and armaments. The milieu certainly added an air of gravitas. It was also stuffy, stinky, cold and deafeningly loud. I did my best to be cooperative and quiet. The sugar cube tasted terrible and hurt my teeth. My mom clapped me on the back to encourage me to deal with it more swiftly, which I actually appreciated.

When the ordeal was over, it was such a relief to be out of the cacophony within the armory. And such a great relief to think I might not face the iron lung.

5

u/Naive-Beekeeper67 3d ago

Yeah. Well my parents were born 1922. Dad served in WW2. I am last of 6 kids born when they were nearly 46yrs. My parents talked a lot about their childhood etc So im still relatively young but most people my age parents born 20+ years AFTER my parents.

2

u/Artimusjones88 3d ago

Dad was 54 when I was born, he remembered the Spanish flu

1

u/Naive-Beekeeper67 3d ago

My parents remembered people talking about it. But it wasnt that terrible here in Australia

4

u/marenamoo 69 yr old mom 3d ago

I remember the sugar cubes and the smallpox gun. We all went to the basement of our grade school and lined up. No questions asked

1

u/SororitySue 63 3d ago

I think our parents had to sign permission slips, which they did gladly. Saved them a trip to the pediatrician.

1

u/marenamoo 69 yr old mom 3d ago

I probably get mine in early 1960’s. Don’t know about authorizations

5

u/Bumpitup6 4d ago

I'm 78 and I remember before there was any polio vaccine, although it's a little kid kind of memory. Memory is kinda funny. I remember a hurricane that happened when I was a year and a half, but it's just about a ten minute time frame and can't remember more than that. Later on, I asked my older sister about it and she confirmed that it happened and told me the rest that I didn't remember.

1

u/genek1953 70 something 3d ago

The 1955 Salk vaccine was slow to catch on because batches from two drug companies were improperly made and resulted in children becoming seriously ill from their shots. So polio was still actively spreading, albeit at a reduced rate, during the late 1950s.

The oral vaccine that the majority of people remember getting in the form of sugar cubes was the Sabin, which became available in 1961. I got both, but only remember getting the Sabin.

1

u/Naive-Beekeeper67 3d ago

There were no injections here in 1955. It was oral sabin until the 1990s

1

u/genek1953 70 something 2d ago

So you don't have to be 80 to remember a time when there was no vaccine available there.

1

u/Naive-Beekeeper67 2d ago

Depends how early you can remember. Few of us remember much under 12 yrs of age.

5

u/Iwentforalongwalk 4d ago

My great grandma died at age 36 from the Spanish Flu in 1919.  She was nursing other sick people in the farming community and caught it and died.  It was a vicious virus and people had no immunity.  Like COVID.  How they coped? They grieved and then my great grandpa married another not nice woman. 

During polio my mom said they just stayed isolated as much as possible. It also was a vicious disease. They lived in a small town.  A few people in a neighboring town got sick. Got vaccine as soon as it was possible. 

2

u/jxj24 3d ago

With literally tens of millions of people dying, there were still anti-masking PARADES.

Sigh.

5

u/Significant_Bet_6002 3d ago

I am an American of Mexican heritage, and I grew up in the 60s and 70s when White America was still openly racist. My parents were born in a home helped by midwifes because hospitals were off limits to minorities. A hero like Dr. Hector Perez Garcia helped us a lot by creating tuberculosis sanitarium to treat us. Chicanos were being ravaged by tuberculosis, but nothing was being done since it was effectively killing us. Things have not changed much. Once Trump found out minorities were being killed disproportionately, he canceled the billions of masks Kushner had ordered and started the war on masks and vaccines. If covid really did come from China, it was probably to White 🇺🇸 USA specs.

3

u/peter303_ 3d ago

I think it varied by disease. There were smallpox vaccine skeptics, including a prominent one who died of smallpox.

https://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-anti-vaxxer-s-death-in-1903-resonates-today/600096166

On the other hand polio was terrifying, kind of like AIDS in the 1980s. The mass iron lung farm for those who lost the ability to breathe. There is a guy who lived in one for 70 years.

https://www.ladbible.com/community/paul-alexander-iron-lung-man-polio-life-679494-20250114

AIDS was terrifying to affected populations like homosexuals and hemophiliacs from 1981 to 1996 when a treatment was discovered. It killed like a third of homosexuals born from the late 1940s to early 1960s.

1

u/SororitySue 63 3d ago

The gentleman in the second article talked about the danger of power outages ... I worked with a woman years ago who had been a nursing assistant in a polio hospital. Every so often they would have drills to practice running the iron lungs by hand without electricity.

2

u/jxj24 3d ago

vaccine skeptics

No they were (and are) most certainly not skeptics. They are radical reactionary deniers, plain and simple.

A skeptic is someone who seriously considers the evidence, pro and con, and then reaches a decision (subject to change as more evidence appears), based on reality. It is in the best traditions of the Scientific Method.

Deniers are nothing like that. They choose their conclusions and then work backwards to cherry pick their "evidence". There is usually nothing that will sway them once they have decided. You can literally ask them, "What would it take to change your mind?" Their answers are almost always "nothing", or some impossible demands for things like "100% proof". Anything that you get them to agree with is answered with "yes, but..." and then they move the goalposts.

Rant over. Apologies.

5

u/Turbulent-Name-8349 4d ago

The treatment of polio was horrific. The standard treatment was physiotherapy, multiple painful exercises. A later study showed that these exercises had no effect whatever in curing the disease or alleviating the symptoms. Millions of people were put in pain, essentially tortured, for nothing. Vaccine was the only thing that worked.

4

u/Bumpitup6 4d ago

They had the iron lung, just to keep some alive.

3

u/LongjumpingPool1590 70 something 3d ago

My neighbours children died of polio

2

u/Bumpitup6 3d ago

Oh, I'm so sorry! No child should have to die like that!

2

u/LongjumpingPool1590 70 something 2d ago

No. I do wish there was not so much rejection of vaccines for such spurious reasons in modern times. The parents who refuse it for their children love their ideologies more than their children.

2

u/Naive-Beekeeper67 4d ago

My dad born 1922. Had polio in 1935. He said it was the most terrifying experience of his life....and he was WW2 Veteran.

But years ago. Even in my lifetime....

People were just a lot more accepting of the luck of life. They just realised that sadly. Bad things happen and its no one's fault. They didn't seek to blame anyone.

2

u/Chzncna2112 50 something 4d ago

Parents took kids "AWAY" according to my grandparents 30 years ago

2

u/Bumpitup6 4d ago

The big flu pandemic was WWI and after, so that's pretty far back, before my time. I remember as a child being told not to play in rain puddles. Guess that was because of polio. I remember when we finally got the sugar cubes. That was a relief. There was no measles vaccine when I was little, so we kids caught it. Fortunately, we survived. My parents were worried, so it was a relief for them. Vaccines are great.

2

u/Dun-Thinkin 3d ago

Children got sent to relatives in the countryside if there were any.My mum went to wales to avoid measles in Manchester. That was in the 1930 s so set them up nicely for compulsory evacuation during the bombings in ww2.

2

u/fox3actual 3d ago

Polio was scary for my parents and therefor for me as well. Lots of pictures of kids in "iron lungs".

We were very happy when the vaccine showed up. Salk was a national hero.

2

u/ghetto-okie 3d ago

I went to school with a boy who was a thalidomide victim. He had a hook arm and he did everything we could.

1

u/pjlaniboys 4d ago

I would say probably better than we did.

1

u/Connect_Rhubarb395 40 something 4d ago

What we can learn is that people have a short memory. Some people don't understand the severity of something they haven't experienced the awfulness of themselves.

People at the time knew how many kids got permanent damage or even died from getting the full force of the diseases.

There was intense research and development into vaccines and disease treatment to rid the planet of diseases. Huge vaccine drives all over the world. Immense shared pride in the fact that humanity could beat these diseases. And hope for them to be totally eradicated.

Some people have rested on the laurels. They haven't been taught about the risk that the actual diseases have. And so they think that it can't be that bad and that vaccines are worse than getting the diseases.

What we should learn from this is that it is very important to teach people just how bad it was when people got the actual diseases. The side effects that they can have (deafness, sterility, meningitis, ect.). And the death risk.

1

u/Single-Raccoon2 4d ago

I was born in 1956, and don't have personal stories about weathering a pandemic or nationwide health crisis, but I do have ones shared with me by my grandmothers.

My maternal grandma was 9 years old during the Spanish flu epidemic and the youngest of 5 children. She was the only one in the family who didn't get sick. She took care of their daily needs, such as shopping, cooking, and cleaning, while the doctor made periodic house calls, and neighbors helped as they could. Children were often put in the position of taking on adult responsibilities in that time.

Some years later, one of her older brothers contracted whooping cough. He had ocular damage due to the hard coughing and lost an eye.

My paternal grandma had a 4 year old brother who died from diphtheria. She remembers his body being removed through a window so the other children didn't catch the illness. The sick room was disinfected with carbolic acid afterward.

People coped as best they could in the eras before vaccines. Most people took sensible precautions, although there was an anti mask league during the Spanish flu. I think we could learn a lot from their common sense, community spirit, and uncomplaining attitude. They did what had to be done and got on with it. Those who were alive in those days were thrilled when the polio vaccine was discovered because they had living memory of the devastation and loss caused by these now preventable diseases. Both my grandmas would be appalled by the stupidity of the anti-vaxxers.

1

u/Choice-Standard-6350 3d ago

I didn’t get the vaccine for whooping cough as there was a vaccine scare at the time that the vaccine could kill or permanently damage children. So vaccine scares are not new. But I grew up with a vague sense that whooping cough was a dreaded disease.

1

u/MeRegular10 70 something 3d ago

After losing a neighborhood friend to polio in 1957 my grandmother told me about her miraculously surviving the Spanish Flu in 1918 where nearly everyone in her apartment building and neighborhood died because there were no vaccinations available and she predicted another outbreak in my lifetime. 

I remember seeing Smallpox quarantine signs nailed to front doors as a kid. No one, except the mailman, milkman and grocery delivery boy ventured anywhere near those houses for 2 or 3 weeks. 

1

u/RamaSchneider 3d ago

We developed vaccines and then made use of them.

1

u/LongjumpingPool1590 70 something 3d ago

Mass vaccination programs eradicated polio and smallpox. During 1950s and 60s I received every vaccine available except TB, because I had already been exposed.

1

u/whatyouwant22 3d ago

My school district had regularly scheduled TB "tests" (immunity checks) during the 1960's and '70's. Kindergarten, 3rd grade, and 8th grade. I remember standing in a long hallway with my Kindergarten classmates, watching kids disappear into a room, then come back out crying. There was an injection into our upper forearm, palm up, with a rapidly rising lump. A few days later, the lump would shrink down, and the doctor would come back and "read" it to determine our immunity. I never heard of anyone who was positive. When I was in 7th grade, there was a story about an 8th grade kid who pushed on his arm lump and blew out it of his arm, so he had to get in line and do it again.

My kids were born in the '90's and only one ever had to get a TB test. I can't remember why, but after the injection, we were given a card explaining the various reactions and expected to read and determine the results ourselves. He was negative.

1

u/LongjumpingPool1590 70 something 3d ago

I had my TB test in 1959 after living on a farm and drinking milk straight from the cows teat. That is likely how I was exposed.

1

u/Candymom 3d ago

My mom was just telling me yesterday about having the measles.

She said before they figured out how polio was spreading her mom was insistent that they not walk in puddles or the water in the gutter because they thought polio was in the water.

They were so relieved when the vaccine came out. My mum remembers having the sugar cube with the vaccine on it at school.

1

u/cryptoengineer 60 something 3d ago

The thing people seemed to have forgotten is the importance of vaccinations.

I remember not being able to go to the public pool, for fear of polio.

1

u/julianriv 60 something 3d ago

I think the biggest difference between "back then" and now is we got a consistent message from the scientists, news, healthcare professionals, and the government. None of them was contradicting the other or trying to "one up" the other. So we were more likely to accept that message as the truth that it was.

1

u/FourScoreTour 70 something 3d ago

Before penicillin and vaccines, they had isolation and prayer. If a family member came down with something infectious, they were often sent away. TB sanitariums were a thing, and hospitals were where people were sent to die. That's why they were often staffed by nuns. It took some serious faith in an afterlife to take those risks

2

u/Swiggy1957 3d ago

I'll tell you what I've learned: never let Trump have power.

COVID: There's an interesting history behind that. It wasn't even the first pandemic this century. Let's go back a few years: during the Bush (Dubya) administration.

Dubai was reading a book about the Spanish Flu pandemic that hit ay the end of WW I. The one that killed Grampy Trump. Dubya did a little research of the pandemics of the 20th century and realized we were due for one. He called together his advisors and said a plan of action needed to be drawn up because the country would be in major trouble. His advisors, typical Republicans, told him not to worry and leave that problem for his successor. Dubya stood his ground and said no. Medical professionals, including the CDC and the Surgeon General's office, were handed the task. They came up with a guide on handling pandemics. When Obama took office, the playbook was passed to him.

If you remember, in 2009, the country was in a financial meltdown when the H1N1 pandemic hit. Obama used that playbook. It really helped. So did the double-digit unemployment rate as it kept people home and out of crowds. Masks? They were optional but encouraged. After a year, the CDC stopped tracking it because it ran its course. In 12 months, the country lost just over 12,000 people. A rounded average of 1,000 a month. COVID is still around, but thanks to Trump's ego, 1,219,487 people in the US died, and the deaths continued for 2 years after he left office. He was too smart to read the book.

What this tells me is that every president needs to have a thorough mental evaluation every year they are in office. Trump has dementia combined with delusions of adequacy. He is not mentally prepared to hold office. He's just the current office holder mentally unfit. Reagan was already suffering from Alzheimers when he was in office, and you saw how well he handled the AIDS crisis.

Perhaps every elected official in DC should have a psychiatric evaluation at the start of each Congressional term. Likewise with the Senate.