A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. I know many of you sang that line. It’s one of those songs almost everyone knows. But do you know where the song came from; the inspiration for it?
It was the polio vaccine.
The story is that Julie Andrews didn’t like a song she was supposed to sing in Mary Poppins. So Walt Disney asked the Sherman brothers to come up with a new song. Something snappy. The Sherman brothers were also the people who had written It’s A Small World, so they can do snappy. But writing a song is not always something you can do on demand. Robert Sherman had reportedly been working all day, trying to come up with a new song. When he got home, he was told his children had gotten a polio vaccine. When he asked one of the children if the vaccine had hurt, thinking it was a needle, he was told it was given on a sugar cube. Suddenly, he had a idea for a song.
I remember the sugar cube. I wasn’t very old, and it probably wasn’t my first vaccine, but I still remember it. Maybe it was the fact that someone gave me a sugar cube that I was allowed to eat. Or maybe it was the fish.
Fish? For anyone who has ever been to the old town hall in Liverpool, you may have also met the fish. It was at one time a record setting tuna caught off Liverpool that was mounted and given to the town. It still lives in the stairwell of the old town hall. Although it could use a bit of work. Some of the paint has fallen off. I’m not sure where you find a tuna painter, but I feel bad for the tuna. He could use a touchup.
Anyway, the first time I met the tuna was when I went for my sugar cube. It seems a bit strange, buy my parents took me to the town hall. We went upstairs to one of the rooms, where there were a lot of people gathered. Basically, the room was full. Since polio was very much a communicable disease, it seems a bit strange to gather a bunch of people in one room for a vaccine. Vaccines are not immediate. It’s not like Popeye eating a can of spinach.
Anyway, all these people gathered in the room were then served sugar cubes, all with a little dye on them, which indicated they had vaccine. People had a nice cube of vaccine, mixed and mingled for a while, then went on their way. I can remember wanting another sugar cube, but wasn’t allowed. It seems multiple doses of vaccine are frowned upon, even if a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.
It wasn’t until very recently that I learned what that song was about. It’s all about the vaccine.
Hopefully we will have another vaccine coming along shortly. One received approval in the United Kingdom today. Hopefully, enough people will get it that we can go back out in public once again.
Maybe if they put it on a sugar cube?
