Active History

The Vaccination Experience: Historical Insights from Children and Families

March 31, 2015 1 Comment

By Mona Gleason

The recent outbreak of measles in North America has again raised questions about why small numbers of parents refuse to have their children vaccinated, despite clear and commanding evidence of its safety and efficacy in preventing disease.[1] Despite these outliers, the vast majority of Canadian families take advantage of publically funded immunization programs to protect their children against highly contagious diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (also known as whooping cough), polio, measles, mumps, rubella, meningococcal disease and varicella (chickenpox). Routinely scheduled vaccinations, occurring over the first decade or so of a child’s life, are taken for granted by most Canadians today as part and parcel of growing up. This taken-for-grantedness, however, belies a painfully fought history. For children and their families, vaccination finally confronted staggering levels of infant and child mortality in the early decades of the twentieth century. Immunization, the result of widespread vaccination programs, represented a new hope against decades of suffering and death for many young Canadians and their families. Continue reading →

Quarantined but Not Forgotten: Combatting Vaccination Resistance with Historical Education

March 31, 2015 2 Comments

By Sara Wilmshurst

LAC, MG 28 I 332, Health League of Canada Collection, Vol. 96, file 17, NIW Sponsored Advertising 1954

I was lucky; no one asked me to glue lentils to my face, so I got to stand by and watch while a medical student was transformed into a smallpox sufferer before my very eyes. The makeup artist found that lentils and Rice Krispies made the most convincing pustules, when coated in makeup and vividly shaded.

We weren’t in a play. This was the Quarantine Tent, an exhibit created by science writer Pippa Wysong. Dismayed by increasing ignorance about vaccines, Wysong designed a display to show people what life was like before vaccination. The Tent featured people dressed- and made-up as disease sufferers, who could describe their condition, the disease’s history, and the vaccine’s invention. At the Quarantine Tent where I helped out I portrayed a polio victim, and adult paralyzed in childhood, while others depicted victims of diphtheria, smallpox, HPV-related cancer, influenza, and whooping cough. We were at Sanofi-Pasteur’s 100^th anniversary celebration, an employee picnic, and plenty of people took a break from enjoying their ice cream to ask what we were up to. I think the gentleman with fictional smallpox drew their attention. It was, as I mentioned above, vivid. Continue reading →

Bacille de Calmette-Guérin, or BCG Vaccine for Tuberculosis

March 31, 2015 1 Comment

BCG Vaccine

By Maureen Lux

Haven’t got your BCG vaccine against tuberculosis? Fortunately, most Canadians don’t need to worry about that one.[1] Though BCG was never widely used in Canada, until very recently most Aboriginal infants were routinely administered the vaccine. The difference has something to do with higher levels of tuberculosis in some, though certainly not all, northern communities; but it has a lot to do with history. Continue reading →

Funding, failures, and faux pas: Vaccines and the complicated task of sharing responsibility for global health

March 30, 2015 2 Comments

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 →}

Victory with Vaccines? A Modified Account for the Twenty-first Century

March 30, 2015 1 Comment

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 →

“Be Wise – Immunize!”: Vaccine Promotion in Canada During the 20th Century

March 30, 2015 1 Comment

By Catherine Carstairs

A growing number of measles cases this winter has reignited the debate over vaccination. While the vast majority of Canadians believe in the merits of vaccination, and inoculate their children against a wide range of diseases, including measles, a significant number of Canadians refuse to vaccinate their children or do not complete the full vaccination schedule.

Vaccine resistance in Canada has a history, as Michael Bliss, Kathryn Arnup and Paul Bator have shown. During a smallpox epidemic that killed more than three thousand in Montreal in 1885, the Health Board of Montreal compelled people to isolate the sick and vaccinate the well. Many working-class Montrealers felt that if the government really cared about their health they would do something about their living conditions, which they rightly believed were contributing to high rates of disease and suffering. The situation was further complicated by the fact that some of the people vaccinated early in the epidemic had developed severe ulcerations and fever. One child died. A crowd of a thousand, mostly men, broke the windows and damaged property at the East End Health Office, at City Hall, the Montreal Herald, the homes of health officials, and pharmacies that sold the vaccine. In Toronto, in 1900, an Anti-Vaccination League was formed to protest compulsory vaccination. In 1887, after the Montreal smallpox epidemic, the government of Ontario had passed legislation requiring that parents have their children vaccinated before they reached the age of four months, and re-vaccinated, if necessary, every seven years. The legislation permitted local school boards to require children to be vaccinated, and the Toronto Board of Education passed a by-law to this effect in 1894. The Anti-Vaccination League sprang into action and five thousand Torontonians signed a petition demanding the repeal of the by-law. Anti-vaccinators noted that there were class divisions in how mandatory vaccination was being applied, objected to the side-effects of vaccination, and did not believe that people should have to vaccinate against their will. Continue reading →

Theme Week: Infectious Disease, Contagion and the History of Vaccines

March 30, 2015 5 Comments

Dr. Schreiber of San Augustine giving a typhoid innoculation at a rural school, San Augustine County, Texas (LOC)

Edited By Jim Clifford, Erika Dyck and Ian Mosby

Infectious disease, public health and vaccination continue to be major news stories in the early twenty-first century, from SARS in 2002-2003 through to H1N1 in 2009 and more recent concerns about Ebola in Sierra Leone, measles at Disneyland and mumps in the NHL. In February 2015, popular Canadian magazine Maclean’s examined the ‘vaccine scandal’, pointing to British Columbia’s ‘bible belt’ where religious communities had resisted vaccination, and where compliance ranged from 70% vaccinated to zero. In the Fraser Valley, with low rates of vaccination, 2,600 people were infected with measles, ultimately resulting in 182 hospitalizations and one infant death. The article concludes by suggesting that part of the solution to the problem is to look to history.

Historical examples abound with familiar stories of epidemics leading to fear then to blame – with groups typically singled out because of their social class, race, ethnicity, or religion. This would then often lead to public health reactions ranging from quarantine to segregation (or even deportation) and, throughout the twentieth century, to more interventionist measures of inoculation and vaccination.

Whether we examine the bubonic plague in the middle-ages, cholera in the mid-nineteenth century, smallpox in Montreal, typhoid fever in New York City, flu epidemics after the First World War (which claimed the lives of more people than those who died in battle), HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, or SARS in the 2000s, there has always been confusion and resistance to public health interventions. In spite of the elements of suspicion and fear that accompany the history of infectious disease, history has also clearly demonstrated improvements in reducing morbidity and mortality. Scholars continue to argue over whether those improvements are exclusively the result of medical interventions or the general improvements in the social determinants of health like rising incomes, improved nutrition, and better education – but the general trend is a positive one. Or, at least until now, if we believe the headlines. Continue reading →

Rock Hudson, the Reagans, and HIV/AIDS Scholarship

March 26, 2015 No Comments

Hudson (left) with President Ronald Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan at a White House state dinner, May 1984, less than three weeks before he was diagnosed with HIV. [Wikipedia]

By Lucas Richert

In recent months, a gay rights group, the Mattachine Society, have helped provide a more expansive view of Rock Hudson’s final struggle with AIDS. In documents obtained from the Reagan Presidential Library and available on BuzzFeed, it is clear that Nancy Reagan refused to help the dying Hudson receive treatment.

This matters. When he died in October 1985, Hudson became the first high-profile celebrity linked to homosexuality and AIDS. He was a major Hollywood star in the 1950s and 1960s and his situation helped create awareness of HIV/AIDS. These recent documents thus provide a fresh perspective on the Reagan administration, sexuality, and at the same time point toward the need for new AIDS scholarship. In the years ahead, scholars will have the opportunity to connect this development in an already well-researched story with novel HIV/AIDS scholarship on African Americans and First Nations in the United States and Canada. Continue reading →

A Useless Import? European Niqab Politics in Canada

March 25, 2015 1 Comment

By Aitana Guia

In 2012, the Canadian Government led by Conservative Stephen Harper approved a policy banning full veiling from citizenship ceremonies. Zunera Ishaq, who wears a niqab and was about to become Canadian citizen, decided to postpone her ceremony in order to ask the Federal Court whether the government policy was legal. In 2015, the Federal Court found the policy illegal and ordered the government to strike it down. Harper’s government has decided to appeal the decision instead.

Mr. Harper justified his position in a parliamentary debate on March 9, 2015: “We do not allow people to cover their faces during citizenship ceremonies. Why would Canadians, contrary to our own values, embrace a practice at that time that is not transparent, that is not open and frankly is rooted in a culture that is anti-women?” (You can watch it here)

While many women have made fun of the Prime Minister for telling them what they can or cannot wear in citizenship ceremonies (#DressCodePM) and arrogating for himself the power to decide what is anti-women, both the 2012 policy and the 2015 court challenge seem to be rather well thought out political positions.

John Ralston Saul articulately argued in A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada against dysfunctional and cowardly Canadian elites who continue to follow a broken European legacy and refuse to embrace the social and cultural complexity that colonial history and immigration have given Canada. Continue reading →

Five Simple Rules for Saving the Maritimes: The Regional Stereotype in the 21st Century

March 24, 2015 8 Comments

By Lachlan MacKinnon

The Maritimes are on the brink of catastrophic economic and demographic failure [1]. Our lack of entrepreneurial spirit, engrained sense of entitlement, conservatism, and folksy racism are major factors preventing us from joining in the prosperity enjoyed by our more enterprising cousins in the “have” provinces of Canada. Such are the problems enumerated in John Ibbitson’s recent Globe and Mail editorial. The “culture of defeatism,” proclaimed by Steven Harper in 2002, is apparently still alive and kicking on the east coast. Despite the popularity of this analytical framework, it is not borne out in the historical literature surrounding region and regionalism in the Maritimes. Nor are the commonly proposed solutions to the actual problems facing the region particularly novel or creative, including those enumerated within the much-lauded Ivany Report in Nova Scotia.

The regional stereotype of the staid and conservative Maritimes is not a recent phenomenon. Historian Ernie Forbes traces the lineage of this notion to 1893, when Frederick Jackson Turner described the “frontier thesis” of American westward development. According to Turner, a profound sense of nationalism and a progressive liberal spirit was the result of continued expansion and settler colonialism in the American west. This concept was readily applied to the Canadian national narrative. Forbes writes: Continue reading →

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