Today people fear Corona, in the past it was super killers like smallpox. We owe some plagues no longer frighten us to vaccines. Without them our life would be terrible.
Do you have children? Yes? Then rejoice that you weren’t living in the early 19th century, but in 2022. At that time, only every second child reached adulthood, and half died at some point between birth and the age of majority. The situation only got a little better in the second half of the century, in 1870 there were only 250 children out of 1,000 who left their parents’ house in the coffin.
What happened? Of course, the hygiene measures had improved, as had the medical care. And research had discovered something that should save millions of families great suffering: the principle of vaccination. The possibility of building a protective shield against deadly diseases in the body.
A plague of the Bible
One of the deadliest epidemics was that smallpox. First small pustules formed, which grew into blisters – the so-called smallpox or flakes – until the face and extremities were completely disfigured. Even after healing, terrible scars remained, and about a third of the survivors went blind.
Even the Egyptians knew the horror of smallpox, in the Bible it is the sixth plague from which the country on the Nile had to suffer. Indeed, the face of some mummies, including that of Ramses V, is disfigured by pockmarks. When the European conquerors brought smallpox into North America in the 16th century, a quarter to 90 percent of the completely unprotected indigenous population died – depending on the estimate. And in Europe around ten percent of all small children fell victim to them towards the end of the 18th century, significantly more than the plague.
Promoting Polio Vaccination: Vaccinations have saved countless people from disease and death. (Source: Rogge / ullstein picture)
There is still no cure to this day. Fortunately, however, a vaccination. Those who were born in West Germany before 1976 or in East Germany before 1980 probably still have a small scar on their shoulder that stems from the vaccination required by law at the time. The smallpox vaccination was actually the first successful immunization in the history of medicine – even if it was not really known at the beginning how and why it worked.
After early attempts to vaccinate people with pus or scabs from infected people with poor disease progression, the English country doctor Edward Jenner developed the vaccination against cowpox towards the end of the 18th century. Vaccines are still called vaccines today, from the Latin vacca, in English: cow. However, it took some time before the general compulsory smallpox vaccination was introduced, not until 1874 in the German Empire.
Legends of Medicine
Those were the years when medical successes rolled over. In 1864 the French Louis Pasteur put forward his theory of germs as pathogens. Robert Koch, Namesake of today’s Institute for Disease Monitoring and Prevention, was able to identify Bacillus anthracis as the cause of the anthrax in 1876, five years later he succeeded in doing the same with Mycobacterium tuberculosis as the causative agent of tuberculosis.
Vaccination against polio 1958: Thanks to protective vaccinations, we no longer have to fear polio. (Source: Shalan Stewart / imago images)
The effort paid off. In 1910 the Infant mortality only around 160 out of 1,000. But it would be a few more years before further vaccinations could actually be developed with the new knowledge about diseases and their pathogens. Meanwhile, death continued to spread terror and suffering. As the “strangling angel of children” – medical diphtheria – he got every fifth sick child under the age of five.
The little ones were feverish and their throats swelled up. If the stranglehold became too strong, the child could not breathe and had to suffocate miserably. Before the later Nobel Prize winner Emil von Behring developed his diphtheria healing serum at the end of the 19th century, the disease sometimes robbed entire regions of their generation of heirs.
Real improvement came only gradually, however, when the diphtheria vaccine was made available in 1923. 1613 is still considered El Año de los Garrotillos, the year of strangulations, in Spanish history.
(Source: ha)
Tuberculosis was also still a common cause of death among children and adolescents. The disease was often called consumption because the name so aptly describes the condition of the sick. At first they are noticeably tired and feel weak. They hardly have an appetite, they are losing weight – they are literally disappearing.
A scourge of humanity
She is constantly tormented by a dry cough. In the evening a slight fever usually sets in, and during the night they sweat profusely. Then there is also a tubercular meningitis, meningitis, the weakened patient is also tormented by convulsions, hallucinations and impaired consciousness. When in the end she dies, all that remains of the body is an emaciated shell.
In 1905 Robert Koch was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for describing the tuberculosis pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis. But it would take another 20 years before a vaccination could take the horror away from consumption.
Franklin D. Roosevelt: The former US president had polio. (Source: ullstein picture)
Around the same time, tetanus immunization also became available. Tetanus is a truly diabolical infection: the bacterium Clostridium tetani causes the muscles to gradually cramp. The sick face tenses in a satanic grin, the so-called devil’s laugh. The back muscles contract so much that vertebrae can break under the pressure.
Violent cramps shake the body, and in the end there is often a risk of suffocation. Today the tetanus vaccination is one of the first to have newborns. They were previously particularly at risk, because if the mother is not vaccinated, cutting the umbilical cord with a contaminated instrument can bring Clostridium tetani into the wound and kill the baby.
Not just teething problems!
Tetanus is hardly treatable, in Germany a quarter of those infected still die today. Thanks to medical advances and new vaccinations, child mortality had dropped to below 100 in 1,000 by 1930. The most terrible diseases were thus banned.
But whooping cough was still rampant and can lead to respiratory failure in infants. Or the flu, which killed 400,000 people in Germany alone during the 1918/1919 pandemic. Polio continued to claim many victims, who were often handicapped for the rest of their lives or were left behind in the iron lung – in 1932 there were still 3,700 in Germany.
Also mumps was still rampant, which can cause meningitis in children and even make boys sterile. Meningitis or pneumonia threatened them too measles. And if a pregnant woman was infected with rubella, her child was often born with severe deformities or even dead.
In the post-war years, vaccines were developed for these diseases as well. Child mortality fell to around 25 in 1,000 by 1970. Today only 3.8 out of 1,000 children in Germany do not reach adulthood.
The most common cause, however, has nothing to do with it Infectious diseases to do. It is mostly the extremely premature babies who die – and premature births are often the result of nicotine or alcohol during pregnancy as well as multiple pregnancies.
So if you have children, now that they are already born, they are relatively safe from death from many infectious diseases. Go over to them right away and hold them tightly in your arms.