Active History

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 →

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 →