Starting in 1927, an epidemic of polio broke out in Canada, and was not quelled until after 1955, when Jonas Salk’s vaccine was approved for widespread use. In between 1927 and 1955, polio was a part of life in the Annapolis Valley. Hazel had a family member stricken.

“He was 14 at the time, so it would have been 1946,” she says, “He had pain, and an upset stomach. The family thought he got sick from drinking out of the brook while he was haying. He was just a youngster, and the sad part was that nobody knew what to do about it until it was too late. He could have been helped, at the start, but nobody knew. He lost the use of his legs, and spent his whole life in a wheel chair. He used to drive a vehicle and all kinds of things, but for the last years of his life, when he was in his sixties, he was bedfast.”

In 1946, the young Foote was one of 2,527 Canadians struck with paralytic poliomyelitis. By 1953, that number had risen to 6,878 across the country, and the Salk vaccine, although not yet approved, was being provided for Nova Scotia Children.

Delma was a nurse at the time. She remembers that Doctor Kelly of Middleton; a man devoted to public health issues, was instrumental in having the children of the area vaccinated against the crippling disease. In 1953, Delma was mother of an infant, and one of few women in the area with a driving license and car. She recalls providing transport to car loads of children as they were gathered at community halls for their anti-polio needles.

“Dr. Kelly would hold clinics and see all the children at once. Now they see them in the office, one at a time, I think the community clinic was more efficient. The doctor would contact some service group like the Women’s Institute or a sewing circle, and ask them to set up the clinic. They needed permission from the parents to see if they were willing for the children to have the needle. 

“Dr. Kelly was interested in treating everybody. Patients were supposed to pay, but we were not allowed to advertise that. Dr. Kelly thought that knowing that might stop people from coming. ‘We just won’t specify,’ he would say. He would leave the clinic with a chocolate-box full of change, and everyone had had the shot. He was a people person. He felt we should all do for the good of everybody, not just a chosen few. He was a healer in every sense of the word.”

“I had a car full of pupils from the Wilmot School, and my own little one propped up between them. I took them to the community hall in Meadowvale,” she recalls. “The public health nurse and Dr. Kelly were there, and pupils from several of the schoolhouses were all brought in. It was needles they got, back then, in later years there was the oral vaccine, and that was given on a sugar cube, but in the
early times, it was needles.”