Active History

By Liza Piper

Editor’s note: This post was originally published by The Otter and is the second in a series of posts edited by Tina Adcock considering the intersection between environmental history and the histories of science, technology, and medicine.

In recent weeks, stories with pro-vaccination and anti-vaccination sentiments have appeared prominently in the news. They address the measles cases that originated in Disneyland and the fears of a significant increase in measles cases in Ebola-affected nations, where the latter disease has disrupted vaccination programs. In the Disneyland cases, media reports have highlighted the role of parents who refused to vaccinate their children. This is, in part, a legacy of Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent research linking autism to the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine. These reports discuss the role unvaccinated children can play in diminishing herd immunity and spreading otherwise well-controlled “diseases of childhood” like measles, but including also mumps (see the NHL outbreaks from last year), rubella, and whooping cough. Continue reading →

By Jessica Pearson-Patel

As Ebola to ravage communities in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea, and as international health organizations fight to develop a vaccine that will conquer the epidemic, the history of vaccinations in Africa seems now to be more relevant than ever. The World Health Organization has recently come under fire for a discovery that WHO representatives deliberately held off on declaring the epidemic to be an international health emergency out of fear of that such a declaration “could anger the African countries involved, hurt their economies or interfere with the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.”[1] Indeed although Guinean health officials announced the Ebola outbreak in March of last year, it would not be until August that the WHO declared the epidemic to be an international public health emergency.[2]

If we take the press response to this discovery to be any indication, this revelation was a shocking one for those who trust that the physical well-being of Africans is and has been the number one driving force behind the development of public health infrastructure in Africa—including the development of vaccines and the expansion of campaigns against epidemic disease. The reality, however, is that these processes have always been shaped by broader political imperative—both colonial and international. Continue reading →

By Joanna Dean

Many of humanity’s most virulent diseases emerged from the fertile intersections of human and other animal bodies. Cures also crossed species barriers, and in the crossing carried a taint of their animal origins. The University of Toronto’s Connaught Laboratories and Farm produced bovine smallpox vaccine from calves infected with cowpox, as well as a variety of products from horses, such as tetanus and diphtheria antitoxins. Photographs disseminated by the laboratory suggest the power of the visual image in calming public fears and managing – even erasing – the animal origins of these biomedical products through an emphasis on hygiene and health.

As Katherine Arnup and Jennifer Keelan have shown for Canada – and Nadja Durbach for Britain – public anger and fear about compulsory smallpox vaccination emerged in a series of popular campaigns from the 1880s through to the 1920’s.[1] While most of the anger was aimed at the compulsory administration of vaccine – intervention of the state into the body of the child and the sanctity of the home – the movements also rejected the animality of the vaccine. On March 1, 1906, when Toronto Board of Education trustee Levee campaigned (5000 signatures in hand) against the compulsory vaccination of school children, he used the strongest possible language: children’s bodies, he said, should not be polluted with “animal matter.”[2] Continue reading →

By Mat Savelli & Erika Dyck

Contagious diseases are usually understood as physical illnesses, but the rather less orthodox idea of infectious mental diseases is worth considering. Historically, public health officials, immigration officers and well-meaning social reformers harnessed the language of madness, mental deficiency and mental illness to galvanize a popular response against the threats posed by such afflicted individuals to the larger body politic. Early 20^th century reformers lobbied governments to stem the tide of feeblemindedness, arm themselves against the hereditary toxins evident in families ‘soaked’ with deficiency, or to segregate people whose feeblemindedness polluted an otherwise wholesome stock of superior humans. The language of mental disease and degeneration sat comfortably with the moralizing tones of public health officials who were keen to sanitize their communities by keeping mental illness out, through immigration restrictions, or marriage regulations, and some went further to treat this infectious possibility through institutionalization and even more overt eugenic measures such as sexual sterilization. Although we might now balk at the unsophisticated collusion of moral reform and the most basic science of heredity of the early 20^th century, the spectre of madness as a contagious phenomenon has continued to evolve into a modern menace. Continue reading →

By Jacob Steere-Williams

These are heady times for those who study mediated communication and social discourse. The January 2015 attack at the Paris office of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which resulted in the death of twelve people, ushered in a wave of reflections on the social shaping power of political cartoons in both form and content. Stoked by controversial caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, the attack demonstrated a deep-seated cultural fissure in the post-9/11 world.

Yet, political cartoons rarely make such headlines, typically operating at a lower level of cultural cognizance. They are what scholars call a “domesticated technology,” normalized into our everyday lives. We peruse the latest copy of The New Yorker or The Onion, embedding political cartoons as a means of entertainment, when in fact they are powerful forms that reify social values and set agendas.

Consider, for example, the divisive public health issues of Ebola and the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) Vaccine. Conceptualizations of health and disease are fundamental ways of understanding both the self and society. Disease is at once a biological reality and a social construction. For at least the last 150 years in the western world, visual metaphors of disease—and the proscribed public health policy implications—have shaped the way societies understand and respond to epidemic crises. In the case of Ebola, the disease is culturally linked to blaming Africans, as Cartoonist Patrick Chappatte’s 2014 cartoon on Ebola demonstrates. The MMR Vaccine, likewise, is tied to fears over autism, as in Cartoonist Mike Keefe’s 2015 cartoon on vaccination that probes the controversy between individual liberty and compulsory vaccination. Continue reading →

By Casey Hurrell

Hackett, Lewis Wendell, “Quince Mil, Yellow Fever vaccination,”100 Years: The Rockefeller Foundation, accessed March 25, 2015.

As the Ebola epidemic winds down in West Africa, the World Health Organization is stressing the necessity of reestablishing routine immunization activities, especially for measles and pertussis (whooping cough).^[1] Estimates suggest that the rate of routine immunization against preventable diseases, including measles, plummeted by up to 75% during the Ebola epidemic.^{[2] Continue reading →}

By Anne Hardy

The declining mortality from infectious disease in Victorian Britain owed little to preventive medical procedures such as vaccination. One thing is certain: the modern anti-vaccine movement has recently brought great attention to the role of vaccines in reducing child mortality during the 20^th century. And while this is particularly true for diseases like measles and polio, the reality is that the greatest decline in mortality from infectious diseases occurred well before the introduction of successful and widely used vaccines. It’s therefore important that we look at the history of infectious diseases and vaccines in context so that we can better understand the role of medicine, social change, and public health more generally in explaining how we got where we are today and what role compulsory vaccination might play in the future.

Infectious diseases have been a scourge of humankind at least since the hunter-gatherers formed settled communities, took up farming and domesticated livestock. For much of history the emergence and impact of these diseases on human societies went unrecorded, except in relation to such drastic events as the Great Plague of Athens, the Black Death, or the appearance of syphilis in Western Europe. It was only in the nineteenth century, when public health became a political and economic issue that the problem began to be documented numerically.

Britain was the first, and for a long time the only, country to put into place a dependable official system for recording deaths and causes of death (as well as births and marriages), from 1837 in England and Wales, from 1854 in Scotland. It was soon abundantly clear that infectious diseases exacted a high price in terms of death and morbidity, and that this was principally an urban problem. Britain’s great cities were hotbeds of infection, their death rates far outstripping those of the county boroughs and rural areas. Continue reading →