In this expanded edition of a widely praised book, now available for
the first time in North America, the renowned journalist Patrick
Cockburn looks at his experience of contracting polio as a child in the
context of a new pandemic, that of COVID-19. The parallels between what
happened 65 years ago and today's crisis are both striking and
salutary.
Cockburn was just six when he woke up one day in the summer of 1956 with
a headache and a sore throat. His parents, Claud and Patricia, had
recently returned to Ireland, to their house in East Cork, careless of
the fact that polio had broken out in Cork City. Patrick caught the
disease and was taken to the fever hospital. The virus attacks the
nerves of the brain and the spinal cord, leading to paralysis of the
muscles. 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.