As physicians, we’ve all learned in detail about the science behind vaccinations, but I suspect few of us have been taught about the history of vaccinations. Sure, we all know that Dr. Jonas Salk developed the poliovirus vaccine, but I wasn’t aware that he inoculated himself, his wife, and his three children with his then experimental vaccine.
When our editorial committee decided to focus on vaccinations as our theme for this month’s Greene County Medical Society’s Journal, I perused the internet for interesting topics. I came across a fascinating website, historyofvaccines.org; this website is a project of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, touted as being the oldest professional medical organization in the United States. I credit the majority of the information in this article to the above website and the rest to the National Institutes of Health (nih.gov) website; I trust that the information is valid and true, based on the agencies behind these websites. Below are some interesting tidbits about vaccine preventable diseases that I found noteworthy to pass on to our readers.
Pertussis
Though the causative agent of pertussis was not isolated until the early 1900s by Belgian scientists Jules Bordet and Octave Gengou, the disease was first described during an epidemic outbreak in Paris in 1578 by the French physician Guillaume De Baillou. He referred to the pertussis infection as the common name “quinte,” hypothesizing that this name was due to the characteristic whooping sound or the five hour paroxysms of the cough.
Diphtheria
It was thought that a Boston minister and prominent colonist, Cotton Mather, was describing diphtheria when he wrote, “In December 1659 the (until then unknown) Malady of Bladders in the Windpipe, Invaded and removed many Children; by Opening of one of them the Malady and Remedy (too late for very many) were discovered.” Reverend Mather was an advocate of variolation and was widely criticized for this view. His second wife and three of his children died of measles in 1713. In 1826, diphtheria received its official name by French physician Pierre Bretonneau.
In 1890, Shibasaburo Kitasato and Emil von Behring developed antitoxin and serum therapy. They showed that the sera of diphtheria immunized guinea pigs contained a protective substance, an antitoxin that prevented the harmful effects when the guinea pigs were reintroduced to lethal doses of diphtheria. Emil von Behring went on to be awarded the first Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1901.
The insurance company, Metropolitan Life, promoted immunizations in New York in 1926 when they donated $15,000 and launched an anti-diphtheria campaign.
Smallpox
As early as the 10th Century, the Chinese were believed to have inoculated themselves with the smallpox virus. It was thought that a Chinese statesman’s son had pulverized powdery smallpox scabs, taken from infected individuals, blown into his nostrils. They may have also scraped smallpox matter onto the skin of healthy individuals. It is also speculated that this inoculation method was first discovered in India and then the practice spread to China.
Smallpox killed several prominent figures in history, including the following: Shunzhi Chinese Emperor Fu-lin; twenty settlers of the Mayflower and their only physician; Queen Mary II of England at thirty-two years of age; and Benjamin Franklin’s four-year-old son. Presidents Andrew Jackson, prior to becoming president, and Abraham Lincoln both contracted smallpox but survived. However, President Andrew Jackson’s brother and President Abraham Lincoln’s valet did not survive their bouts with this disease.
Edward Jenner born in 1749 in Gloucestershire, England, is known as the “Father of Immunology” after his deliberate use of a vaccination to control smallpox. His work was the first scientific attempt to control an infectious disease; this led to the method of vaccination eventually replacing variolation as the method of choice.
The Empress Dowager of Russia was a proponent of vaccinations. In 1801, she gave a young smallpox vaccinated orphan girl a pension for life, and named her Vaccinoff.
The United States Vaccine Agency was established in 1813, after Congress authorized and President James Madison signed “An Act to Encourage Vaccination.” The United States Post Office was required to carry for free any smallpox vaccine material in mail that weighed up to 0.5 ounces.
In 1836, Dr. Edward Ballard, an English physician, advised a better method to increase the potency of cowpox vaccination by using newer rather than older strains of the disease.
As early as 1918, a freeze-dried vacuum packed smallpox vaccination was available and used in tropical climates.
Biological warfare is nearly as old as warfare itself, and smallpox was one of those weapons. Smallpox-infected blankets were distributed to Native Americans by British settlers. Five thousand of the 10,000 Continental Army soldiers contracted smallpox during the Battle of Quebec; a British commander sent recently variolated civilians into the Continental Army’s encampments, which may have been a deliberate attempt to spread the disease.
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis was such a deadly disease in the 1800s that the German physician Dr. Robert Koch, on March 24, 1882, during his announcement of his discovery of the agent that causes tuberculosis said, “One in seven of all human beings dies from tuberculosis. If one only considers the productive middle-age groups, tuberculosis carries away one-third, and often more.” He went on to win a Nobel Prize in 1905 “for his investigations and discoveries in relation to tuberculosis.”
1 Picture = 1,000 Words
Typhoid
Mary Mallon, an Irish immigrant, was a cook for wealthy New York families. She was the first identified healthy carrier of typhoid who spread the disease to others. She was detained in hospitals by the New York City Department of Health from 1907–1910 and then released with the agreement, that she would not work as a cook and that she would take measures to prevent the spread of typhoid. However, in 1915, she was caught working as a cook again and found responsible for spreading typhoid to twenty-five people. She is otherwise known as “Typhoid Mary.”
Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur was born on December 27, 1822 in Dole, France and died on September 28, 1895 at the age of seventy-two. He observed a rabies outbreak firsthand as a schoolboy in 1831. He was a chemist and was the chairman of the chemistry department at the University of Strasbourg. He had two daughters die of typhoid fever and one daughter die of a liver tumor. Known by most for his pasteurization method to prevent the growth of bacteria in food items, he also developed several veterinary vaccines, was the first scientist to artificially attenuate viruses for vaccination use and developed the rabies vaccine for human use. In 1876, the New York Board of Health established a vaccine farm in New Jersey, where in 1879, Pasteur produced the first laboratory-developed vaccine, the vaccine for chicken cholera. On July 6, 1885, Joseph Meister was the first person to survive a post-rabies exposure vaccination by Pasteur. Joseph was badly bitten by a rapid dog and until then, Pasteur had never successfully used the vaccine on a human. Pasteur felt the nine-year-old child would surely die, so he took a very risky legal chance and succeeded in saving the boy from developing rabies. Mr. Meister went on to be a caretaker of Pasteur’s tomb at the Institute Pasteur.
As of February 6, 2015, the CDC has reported 121 measles cases in 17 states, mostly from an ongoing outbreak linked to an amusement park in Orange County, California. Most cases were unvaccinated (55%) or of unknown vaccination status (31%).
Source CDC
Polio
In 1929, Drs. Drinker and McKhann published a paper describing successful treatment of paralytic polio with the use of an artificial respirator. First called the Drinker respirator, this sealed tube-like electric powered machine later became known as the Iron Lung.
The March of Dimes was born in 1938 when entertainer Eddie Cantor suggested on the radio that people send dimes to President Roosevelt to help fight polio. Within a few weeks, 2,680,000 dimes were mailed to the White House.
Making Vaccinations Mandatory
Vaccination requirements have become a part of the law. The United Kingdom Vaccination Act of 1853 made smallpox vaccinations mandatory for infants in their first three months of life. Germany made smallpox vaccinations mandatory in 1874. In 1902, the United States Congress passed The Biologics Control Act that is the first modern federal legislative measure to control the quality of drugs; this act created the Hygienic Laboratory of the United States Public Health Service, which eventually morphed into the National Institutes of Health. On February 20, 1905, the United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of mandatory smallpox vaccination programs in the case of Jacobson v Massachusetts.
Biography
Victor M. Pace, MD, FAAFP, is a Family Practice physician in Springfield, Mo., affiliated with Elfindale Family Medicine.
Contact: vmpacemd@aol.com
Footnotes
Reprinted with permission from the Greene County Medical Society.