Get the latest tech news
Infectious diseases in Victorian novels highlight public health fragility now
Between 40% and 50% of children didn’t live past 5 in the US during the 19th century. Popular authors like Charles Dickens documented the common but no less gutting grief of losing a child.
Multiple technologies now prevent epidemic spread of these and other once-common childhood illnesses, including polio, tetanus, whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever and cholera. Household Words, January 1853, p.10, CC BY-SA In 1856, Archibald Tait, then headmaster of Rugby and later Archbishop of Canterbury, lost five of his seven children in just over a month to scarlet fever. Modern readers, unused to earnest evocations of communal grief, may mock such sentimental scenes because it is easier to laugh at perceived exaggeration than to frankly confront the specter of a dying child.
Or read this on Hacker News