Thread by @kittensnotkids

Part of my PhD education was in history of childhood (Anglo-American). For hundreds of years, parents were devastated when their infants and kiddos died of diphtheria, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, mumps. Or when babies were born with horrible, untreatable disabilities +

Because the mom had or was exposed to rubella (German measles). Beloved siblings, friends, neighbors died or were disfigured from smallpox. In a time before decent care for the disabled, being blinded, losing hearing, developing other post-illness disabilities was catastrophic

Mary on Little House on the Prairie went blind after scarlet fever. Helen Keller went blind & deaf after a similar illness. The pages of fiction and diaries and nonfiction are overflowing with dead children & disabled teenagers because of illnesses, and grieving families.

Men, and some women, devoted lifetimes to researching these diseases in an effort to find a way to prevent them. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu brought back smallpox inoculation from Turkey, where Arab doctors had been doing it for years

Lady Mary's brother died of smallpox, and she herself was disfigured by it. She was desperate to protect her children from it & saw inoculation being practiced in the Ottoman Empire. It was a HUGE breakthrough. Jenner's cowpox vaccine was a goddamn miracle.

The history of medicine is fascinating & revolting but every treatment & every preventive measure comes about because of the heartbreak of severe illness and death. By the time Maurice Hilleman got to cranking out vaccines, there was big money in it but that wasn't his motivation

Hilleman is responsible for vaccines for strains of hepatitis, meningococcus, measles, mumps, and rubella, as well as the combined MMR. Millions of children are alive, with full use of their limbs and eyes and ears because of Hilleman.

There are a lot of years between now and the nights of mothers anxiously sitting over their feverish, struggling children, wondering if the whooping cough or tb will take that child from her before sunrise. I hate that we've lost sight of those anxious, dreadful nights.

If people read the young reader book Race Against Death, and saw how death stalked the children of Nome, AK in the guise of diphtheria; if people read Jo's agonizing bout with smallpox in Bleak House, or the grief-stricken letters of bereaved parents, they would not, COULD not

Demonize immunologists, vaccines, vaccine science the way they do.
It beggars belief that people who are perhaps only alive today BECAUSE of vaccines think those vaccines are bad, harmful, etc.
Get your kids & yourself vaxxed.

Note: it's imperfect & focuses on Balto, who was NOT *the* hero dog but you know, they were ALL good dogs and heroes. My 2nd grade teacher read this to us in 1986 & I've been mildly obsessed ever since. a.co/d/fxsDR48