The Broken Boy
The Broken Boy It is very easy to get polio. His parents, Claud and Patricia Cockburn, had recently returned to Ireland, to their house in East Cork, careless of the fact that a polio epidemic had…
Specifikacia The Broken Boy
The Broken Boy
It is very easy to get polio. His parents, Claud and Patricia Cockburn, had recently returned to Ireland, to their house in East Cork, careless of the fact that a polio epidemic had broken out in Cork City. The celebrated Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn was just six years old when he woke up one day in the summer of 1956 with a headache and a sore throat.
The virus attacks the nerves of the brain and the spinal cord leading to paralysis of the muscles. Cockburn caught the disease and was taken to the fever hospital where, alone for the first time in his life, he was kept in isolation. Patrick could no longer walk.The Broken Boy is at once a memoir of Patrick Cockburn's own experience of polio, a portrait of his parents, both prominent radicals, and the story of the Cork epidemic, the last great polio epidemic in the world, affecting 50,000 people. This