What did they give me?

February 2, 2015 6:09 PM

Along with everyone in my grade school in the late 1960's (US), I was given some medicine - I think. What was it?

All of the talk of vaccinations in the news has me remembering (or mis-remembering) being given something in grade school. I mentioned it to a friend, and she talked about a little cup with sugar cubes. My own memory is of a tiny multi-pronged thing, but definitely not a needle. This was in the mid-late 1960s or maybe early 1970s.

I'm guessing it was a vaccine or a booster for one. The friend is a few years older, so it's possible she's thinking of something earlier, maybe even the polio vaccine.

Anyway, assuming she and I are not mixing up some tv show with own own realities, what, if anything, were we given?

posted by AMyNameIs to Health & Fitness (18 answers total)

Polio was given on sugar cubes.

Lots of immunizations were given in school via Jet Injector.

If you got poked on the forearm with a four pronged dealie, you may have been tested for TB (likely) or Valley Fever (less likely, unless you lived in Arizona or California's central valley.)

A lot of this stuff was done in schools.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 6:12 PM on February 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

Might it have been a small pox vaccine? They left little circular scars like this.
posted by goggie at 6:16 PM on February 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

The small pox vaccine was administered with a bifurcated needle from 1966 to 1977.
posted by mbrubeck at 6:18 PM on February 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

God that bifurcated needle sounds terrible (but it also sounds like what you experienced as a kid). Did they really prick you 15 times with that sucker?
posted by RustyBrooks at 6:21 PM on February 2, 2015

Best answer: Might it have been the now-deprecated TB tine test? I remember getting those in the 80s. I loved them because they poked for just a second but didn't really hurt, not like a real shot hurts.
posted by Andrhia at 6:26 PM on February 2, 2015 [7 favorites]

If a mod thinks this needs to go that's fine, but I got a small pox shot in the late 80's. They were still given to military personnel in basic training back then. Now I believe they no longer do this, but do it prior to deployment instead.

Anyway, they used one of those bifurcated needles on my upper arm. They didn't poke us 15 times as I remember it (but this was 27 years ago). They took the needle and scraped you with it several times and a few days later you had a disgusting pustule that itched like hell and looked like a giant pimple. If you didn't scratch you didn't get much of a scar. Most guys got a scar.

We also had an airgun that shot a TB (I believe) vaccine in your arm. It sort of looked like staple gun, but used air to force vaccine under your arm. If you held still you were good. Some guys flinched and had little cuts. Most just got welts.
posted by cjorgensen at 6:28 PM on February 2, 2015

I also think what you are talking about in the late 60's or early 70's in the U.S. would have been a tine TB test, not vaccination. I have vague memories of getting one myself at school in PA in that era. In that era you would have been getting a smallpox vaccination at the doctor's office, not at school. Ditto for polio. I remember getting a polio vaccination via the paper cup of sugar cubes in the very early 1960's via a mobile truck on the U.S. air force base we were living at. My sister, 5 years younger, got her polio vaccination at the doctor's office.
posted by gudrun at 6:48 PM on February 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

Doses of oral polio vaccine are added to sugar cubes for use in a 1967 vaccination campaign.
posted by alms at 6:50 PM on February 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

the 4-prong test was definitely a TB test...IIRC, the different prongs had differing concentrations of the antibodies (?)...or something like that. What I definitely remember was the really cool embossed card (like Braille) that they gave us showing what it was supposed to look like over the next couple of days. The bumps were supposed to develop in such that one was bigger and the others progressively smaller. Or, that was what it what it was supposed to NOT look like (I was young, sorry), but pretty that was the desired (you're ok, TB-negative) result.
posted by sexyrobot at 7:09 PM on February 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

I also remember the pronged TB test from the late 60s or early 70s. It was inside the wrist and like Andrhia mentioned, they didn't hurt at all, it just felt like it was pressing against your skin. Oh! On preview, yes, those embossed cards!
posted by Room 641-A at 7:22 PM on February 2, 2015

I clearly recall the tine test - like a bunch of thumbtacks pressing on the skin. Early 70s childhood. Smallpox, as noted above, happened for me at the doctor's office. I have no memory of it but I have a scar!
posted by Miko at 7:45 PM on February 2, 2015

I'm betting it was a TB test. I got them in school in the early 80's.
posted by quince at 8:23 PM on February 2, 2015

Sabin polio vaccine. TB test.
posted by JimN2TAW at 9:05 PM on February 2, 2015

Sugar cube was definitely polio vaccine, multi-prong thingie definitely smallpox --- both of which I too had lo those many years ago.

(The smallpox one often left a permanent scar, usually on the upper arm: a circular dimple with dots from those prongs inside.)
posted by easily confused at 1:45 AM on February 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: The consensus is the TB tine test. I didn't expect that at all. My friend must have received the polio sugar cubes a few years before that.

As for smallpox, I don't see a scar although, admittedly, it might have disappeared after all these years.

I only marked the first one as "best" just in case more answers came in, but thank you, everyone.
posted by AMyNameIs at 5:17 AM on February 3, 2015

Does your friend say they had the multi-prong test/vaccine/whatever on their forearm/wrist or on their upper arm, just a little below the shoulder? Lower would be the TB, upper the smallpox.

(And the smallpox vaccination scar can vary widely: my father's was about an inch & a half wide, and dimpled deep enough that he could put two stacked quarters in it, with very clear separate 'poke' marks inside. My own is maybe half an inch wide, and I have to really hunt to even find it.)
posted by easily confused at 5:43 AM on February 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

Sugar cube was definitely polio vaccine, multi-prong thingie definitely smallpox --- both of which I too had lo those many years ago.

Same here -- we lined up for the oral vaccine at the local high school two or three Saturdays in a row, early 1960s. A few years later, we were amused to learn the sugar cube was also being used to administer LSD.
posted by Rash at 8:26 AM on February 3, 2015

Definitely polio vaccine and TB test. I remember the TB test because I came up with a false positive. Had to go in for the chest x-ray the whole thing. I took the TB test again in college in the mid-70s, came up false positive again, related my story, the doctor said don't bother taking them anymore because I'm so obviously sensitive to the test.
posted by lhauser at 12:07 PM on February 7, 2015