I can still picture an incident from my childhood. I was so thirsty, so very thirsty. I came slowly down the stairs, my throat so sore and dry I couldn’t speak above a whisper. “Mommy, Mommy,” I croaked — no response. Finally, she came with a look of guilt and dismay on her face. “Mommy, I’m so thirsty.” I was about 6 years old, living near Pittsburg, Pennsylvania with my mother, my father and my two sisters, Beverly, 3½, and Mary Christina, 6 months. My mother, having just moved into a house far from anyone she knew, had been in the kitchen with her two other children and had not heard the bell ringing — the bell she had put by my bed so I could summon her.

I was very sick and running a high fever. I had just recovered from measles, and then I had caught the seasonal flu. Beverly tells me she used to sit by my bed, watching me; I was so still, so very still. There were no vaccines for most viruses in those days. Children just got sick and they relied on their immune systems to carry them through. Parents put cold compresses on a child’s forehead and administered aspirin to control the fever, waiting for the fever to “break” — a sure sign that the worst was over. Some children died. Measles had a 0.2% death rate and it also could cause blindness, seizures, and brain inflammation. I was kept in a dark room to minimize the chance of blindness.

In the early 1900s, before the advent of antibiotics and most vaccines, death in childhood was common. People would say, “she bore 9 children and raised three to adulthood.” The worst disease was smallpox, which killed 30% of its victims. A vaccination technique for smallpox became widely known in Europe in the early 1700s, but a host of other diseases and infections beset children, and the best people could do was to bathe their children in cool water and hope they would survive.

By the time I was born in 1943, vaccines had been developed for some of the more deadly diseases: rabies in 1885, tetanus in 1923, and diphtheria in 1926, according to Wikipedia. But I and my sisters still had to live through a number of diseases:

• Mumps, which caused swollen glands in the neck and made one look like a chipmunk with a full stash of nuts. It could attack the breasts, meninges, ovaries, and testes causing reduced fertility or, rarely, infertility.
• Rubella, which was a mild rash and fever for a child but could cause birth defects if caught by a pregnant woman.
• Chickenpox, which caused high fevers and red, yellow-capped pustules all over the body. It was miserable but not too serious in young children but quite serious if caught by teens or adults. We used to have “chicken pox parties” to expose our children at a young age so they could get it and be done. My older son Curtis never caught it at the parties. When he came down with it at 19, he was really sick, but fortunately he did not develop the pneumonia or brain inflammation that sometimes resulted.

I was fortunate that the first antibiotic, penicillin, became widely available in 1941, just before I was born. Before penicillin, pneumonia had a 30% fatality rate; with modern antibiotics and the development of vaccines in 1958 and 1977 to prevent pneumonia from the two main bacterial causes, mortality is now less than 1%. A strep throat could turn into rheumatic fever that caused permanent damage to the heart and was often fatal, as was famously the case for Beth in the book Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Among indigenous and people in developing countries where antibiotics are not readily available, rheumatic fever caused 374,000 deaths even in 1990. An eye infection could lead to blindness. An ear infection could infect the mastoid bones behind the ear — a leading cause of death in children before penicillin.

I had ear infections often as a child. I remember lying on a bed next to my mother as she ironed; each time she ironed a handkerchief, she passed it to me to put on my ear — it felt so good. My mother would also put warm oil in my ear, which eased the pain. I suggested warm oil to my pediatrician when my children had ear infections, but she pooh-poohed it. “The infection is behind the ear drum. Putting something in the ear canal cannot cure that,” she scoffed. But it does, in fact, ease the pain and I think it is widely used for that now. I don’t remember getting penicillin for my ear infections, but most likely I did.

My father, who was born in 1919, grew up before the days of penicillin. If we got a sore throat, my father would look into our throats with a flashlight. If he saw yellow-topped red blisters, he would dip a long, cotton-tipped wand into iodine and “paint” the back of the throat — something they did in his childhood on the farm no doubt. He himself frequently had boils in his teens that he treated with a milk bottle. He would put a hot water compress on the boil to soften the skin and pour hot water into a milk bottle. After the skin was soft, he would empty the bottle and center the mouth of the bottle on the boil. As the hot air in the bottle cooled, it would form a vacuum that would open the boil and suck out the infection.

Narcotics were widely used when I was a child. If we had diarrhea, my mother’s weapon of choice was a chalky white mixture of Kaopectate and Paregoric. Kaopectate is similar to Pepto Bismol but Paregoric is an oral liquid that contains morphine as its main active ingredient. If we had a cough, she had a bright red cough medicine, Terpin Hydrate and Codeine, which was very effective. These drugs required a prescription, but doctors prescribed them freely. She also gave us Coca-Cola if we had a sick stomach, but, although Coke did have at least some cocaine in its early formulation, all traces of cocaine were gone by 1929, long before my birth,

The epidemic I lived through was the polio epidemic of 1952. As described in Wikipedia:

Small localized paralytic polio epidemics began to appear in Europe and the United States around 1900… Outbreaks reached pandemic proportions in Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand during the first half of the 20th century. By 1950, the peak age incidence of paralytic poliomyelitis in the United States had shifted from infants to children aged five to nine years, when the risk of paralysis is greater; about one-third of the cases were reported in persons over 15 years of age… Accordingly, the rate of paralysis and death due to polio infection also increased during this time… In the United States, the 1952 polio epidemic became the worst outbreak in the nation’s history.

I was nine and living in Hingham, Massachusetts, when the epidemic raged here in the summer of 1952. No one knew how it was transmitted and there was no treatment. We children were forbidden to go to the movies or the beach, which were common activities for us since we lived within walking distance of both; we just stayed home all the time that summer. We did go to school in September, so the epidemic must have abated by then; it typically peaked in the summer.

In 1954, they started testing a vaccine, and my sister Beverly became a “polio pioneer,” taking part in a double-blind test that was administered in school (I can’t even imagine parents allowing that today!). We never knew whether she got the real vaccine or the saline solution, but Beverly is convinced she received the real vaccine because it made her arm swollen and sore for a day or two.

In 1955 or thereabouts, the U.S. undertook a massive project to vaccinate all schoolchildren. I remember lining up with all my classmates to receive the injection. I, like many children, was very afraid of getting shots. I was, therefore, already in a state of high anxiety as I waited my turn. As I watched, the needle broke off in the arm of the girl in front of me and blood started running down her arm. I fainted. Throughout that day, students were fainting all over the school — mass hysteria, I suspect. In 1961, an oral vaccine became available, which was less traumatic. Now polio has been nearly eradicated from the world.

I was lucky with my epidemic. Although 58,000 cases were reported that year in the United States (3,145 died and 21,269 were left with mild to disabling paralysis), at least the epidemic occurred in the summer. And since it affected mostly people ages 5–15, locking down the children for a few months was not so bad. In contrast, the flu epidemic of 1918 killed about 675,000 in the U.S., many of them healthy young adults.

As I write this in November 2020, the world is in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic which is likely to last until mid-2021 when most people will have been vaccinated. So far, 269,000 in the U.S. have died, mostly people over 65 years of age. Although most children who catch Covid-19 have only mild if any symptoms, many parents are frantic with worry. Some people have long-term aftereffects such as heart damage and brain inflammation, and we just don’t know yet if these aftereffects are temporary or permanent. I am grateful that we had vaccines and medicines for the worst diseases by the time I was raising children and that I never had to shepherd my children through a pandemic such as this one.