The Assemblagist

In Bet­ter Homes and Gar­dens (1953) there’s a curi­ous arti­cle by Don­ald G. Cow­ley dis­cussing med­i­cine. The arti­cle, titled “There’s News In Med­i­cine, When Doc­tors Meet to Catch Up With Med­ical Progress”, con­tains some rather inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion. There is not yet a polio vac­cine in 1953. How old are you? Do you know about polio? Do you remem­ber get­ting vac­ci­nated, lin­ing up at schools to drink a sug­ary mix from a lit­tle paper cup? I do. And I remem­ber John Ful­wiler, who died in Atlanta back around 1982, one of our last polio “poster children”.

Doc­tors dis­cuss measles. My mom had measles in the 1950s. It par­tially par­a­lyzed her arm for years, caused her pain the rest of her life. Seri­ous stuff.

And high blood pres­sure. Back then, doc­tors were con­sid­er­ing remov­ing the adrenal glands in patients whose BP couldn’t be con­trolled through reg­u­lar mea­sures. Those with­out the glands would be given cor­ti­sone to replace the gland’s function.

We take the erad­i­ca­tion of these dis­eases for granted, don’t we?

Oh, and one other truly fas­ci­nat­ing tid­bit. Pork. Yup, the tri­chono­sis prob­lem reared its ugly head over fifty years ago. The solu­tion? Irra­di­ate the meat. Here’s the best part — it was sug­gested that pork be irra­di­ated with the waste prod­ucts of atom bomb plants.

Yup. That’s what it says.

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