IIn November 1953, shortly after her tenth birthday, Joni Mitchell was flown to a hospital in Saskatoon with symptoms of paralysis. Canada has just been hit by a polio epidemic, and a virus vaccine won’t be available until a year and a half later. The doctors prescribe absolute bed rest to the patient, too much exercise could mean a life in a wheelchair. During the day, Mitchell will later say, everyday hospital life was still bearable, “but at night you could hear it, the iron lungs. This wheezing breathing (…). If the disease spread to the lungs, you came into the iron lungs, because then you needed this mechanical help. And once you were inside, it was quite possible that you would never get out again. “
Mitchell came out. Her legs and lungs remained undamaged for the time being, even if she should soon maltreat the latter with four packs of cigarettes a day. Before that, however, she had to endure several months of inpatient isolation in which her parents hardly visited her. David Yaffe, literary scholar at the University of Syracuse, sees this experience as the origin of Mitchell’s lonely resilience, a lifelong resistance to authority figures, dominant lovers or people in the music business.