Skelendipity

As the world struggles to recover from the Covid pandemic, it has been interesting to think back on earlier epidemics that have affected my life. As a small child, I received the smallpox vaccination and the polio sugar lump (Sabin) version, later a booster injection. These were two horrible diseases you seldom hear about anymore but that caused widespread death or disability and disfigurement. Polio was known at the time as Infantile Paralysis, but it didn't just affect children, although photos of them being confined to iron lungs were the stuff of nightmares.  Children in Iron Lungs, c. 1950 When I was born in the Nkana Mine Hospital in Northern Rhodesia [Zambia] just after World War II, a polio epidemic was raging in the vicinity. You can see Nkana in the centre of this map, from the Infantile Paralysis Foundation, that shows where it was concentrated, and the legend shows the number of cases per 100,000 population as being at the highest end of the scale.  My mother had an em

  It didn’t take long for Gerald Purcell Fitzgerald to recover from the loss of Alice ( see Part I ).  Within months of her demise, early in 1899 he met American heiress Lida Eleanor Nicolls (b. 1875) on a train and married her in the Cathedral of St. Vibiana in Los Angeles, California on 1 March 1899. Three sons were born to the couple: John, in September of that year, and twins Gerald and Edward a year later in 1900. Lida Eleanor Fitzgerald, later Princess Lida of Thurn and Taxis It was obviously a stormy marriage and by August 1904 it was all over. The divorce documents available to read online extend to well over 80 pages and are full of savage and vitriolic accusations. Who to believe? Gerald’s affidavit states that Lida committed adultery with one Kenneth Macdonald in London on several occasions in 1904, as well as with another unknown man from whom she contracted a sexual disease. Lida countered saying that she had contracted the sexual disease from him , that Gerald had commit