196 When doctors made house calls

I drove my husband to the doctor's office this morning and instead of the usual array of magazines to read while I waited, I found a nice book, "Medicine's Great Journey; one hundred years of healing" (1992). I had recently seen the cover photo someplace on the web--it's by W. E. Smith for Life Magazine in 1948 of a doctor in coat, tie and hat walking through the weeds to a rural home.

One of the last house calls I remember was in 1949, when a doctor who drove from Mt. Morris to our house in Forreston to see my ill sister, gave my parents the bad news that she might have polio. I have few tender memories of Dad, but I still see him carrying her, a good sized adolescent, wrapped in a blanket, out to the family car to be taken to the Freeport IL hospital. She survived the disease and therapy, and we were all quarantined. Dad couldn't return to our home after the sign was put on our house. Our library books had to be destroyed rather than returned. My school classmates wrote me letters which were brought to the house and left on the porch. Odd what children put away to remember.

She survived, but post polio syndrome returned to haunt her later years and contributed to her death from a diabetic stroke. I will blog about that in February, the anniversary.

A few weeks before her hospitalization in 1949, my cousin Jimmy had died of the same bulbar polio. We had all been at a Sunday afternoon family dinner together the day before he became ill. In my mind's eye Jimmy was the golden child--handsome, athletic, black curly hair, charming.

Two years ago I went back for a high school reunion and one of the guys, an all-sports athlete, and still an active golfer and little league coach, gave us a walk down memory lane of all the athletes that had come out of our little school. The two in our class who actually made careers out of it were women, and we had no organized, competitive sports for women in the 1950s.

In the course of that presentation he talked about Jimmy. How even at age 12, playing basketball and football, he was spectacular--everyone knew he had the potential to be a state champ. I was so shocked to hear his name--in my years at that school (I transferred there 2 years after his death) I'd never heard him mentioned. I suppose I thought only family remembered him. Odd what children put away to remember.