Our reading today is taken from chapter 6 of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens:
The month’s trial over, Oliver was formally apprenticed. It was a nice sickly season just at this time. In commercial phrase, coffins were looking up; and, in the course of a few weeks, Oliver acquired a great deal of experience.
The success of Mr. Sowerberry's ingenious speculation, exceeded even his most sanguine hopes. The oldest inhabitants recollected no period at which measles had been so prevalent, or so fatal to infant existence; and many were the mournful processions which little Oliver headed, in a hat-band reaching down to his knees, to the indescribable admiration and emotion of all the mothers in the town.
Measles vaccine was not introduced to Britain until 1968, but I have often thought how miraculous earlier vaccines must have seemed to mothers of my own mother's generation. Suddenly, they didn't have to worry about diseases, like diphtheria and polio, that had haunted their own childhoods.
And now, in the US at least, there are many who would throw this blessing away.
h/t @sarahinrainbows
Middlesex County Council got a consignment of the still-experimental measles vaccine in 1963. I was given it. Annually thereafter until I turned 30, first my parents then (once I was 16) I myself were sent a letter asking whether I had had measles or been in contact with anyone who had. The letters told us the vaccine was still working well throughout that time. See also The London Archives MCC/CL/HS/04/186
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ReplyDeleteAnonymous25 March, 2025 11:44
When I was a little boy I was told about the "Serum Run to Nome" in 1925 when a load of men with huskies and sleds took the vaccine to a snowbound town in Alaska. Real Boys Own Paper stuff. And then there was Mrs Rooseveldt's March of Dimes initiative in the 1940s to stamp out polio. Both caught the public imagination as undisputed Good Things, but if they were attempted today there would be riots in the streets against them. It's so sad.