March 1, 2024 • 25 mins
Tracy mentions tracking down sources for quotes about Rebecca Crumpler during research. She and Holly also discuss measles vaccine protocols.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio Happy Friday.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We talked about Rebecca Crumpler
this week. Sure did a topic that turned out to be.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Challenging. It a different way than I.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Expected because of all the baby discussion. Well, there is
a lot of baby discussion. Thank you for bearing with
the baby discussion, Holly.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
I know it's not your favorite.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
It's not the talking. I mean again, we know I
don't need to believe it, and I don't want anybody
who has and loves babies to feel weird. I just
like the discussion of baby care really squiggs me out.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Not for you, No, No.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
What turned out to be challenging was the amount of
information was fine, uh, but I kept finding like all
the sources would say the same thing, and I would
just sort of go, okay, but like, where is this
coming from?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Though?
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Like I kept seeing the same quote about the the
sort of reluctance to allow her to graduate from medical school,
which you can read as like I don't think she
had a ton of formal education and she definitely had
to take time off to care for her husband as
he was dying, and so like, I can imagine that
both of those things would have been caused for concern.
(01:33):
I can also imagine racism being prominently involved in the
decision making and how she was judged. But I just
kept going, okay, like this is clearly quoting from something.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
What are we quoting from?
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (01:54):
This led me down.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
I find I found like a place that had the actual,
like actual footnote of what, you know, what collection it
was in. And then that was a whole other little
rabbit hole because I did not write down who, like
which which collection this was said to be a part of.
(02:15):
But the university it was being held at is not
there anymore. Oh, it was absorbed by Drexel University. I
don't know if absorbed is the right. I did not
look into like the details of like how these universities
came under the same umbrella. But this is a thing
that sort of led me to wish that I had
(02:36):
a little time machine, because had things aligned differently while
I was on that trip to Philadelphia to see the
Marie Lawrence exhibit, I could have like extended my stay
by a day and see if I could go and
like get access to the actual file box of actual information,
(03:00):
which is a collection of information that was compiled by
somebody named Margaret Jaredo about I think specifically early black
women doctors, like early black women in the medical profession.
And I am very curious about what all else is
(03:25):
in that collection, and you know, it could be a
magic box of information and discovery. Uh, it does seem
to be something that was compiled with a lot of
care and attention and is now in the in the collection. Uh,
you know, it's there in the finding aid at Drexel University,
but not at a time that I could have gotten
(03:46):
to such a thing. And I was very late in
the research process when I finally like actually penned down
where we're quoting from on stuff something that I wanted
to note, but that I didn't put in the actual
episode because it's not directly related to her. So she
was the first black woman known to have earned an
(04:06):
MD in the United States. That is an achievement on
its own, earning a medical degree in general. But this
was also sort of at a very early time in
the process of things like nursing and midwiffery and medicine
becoming a lot more formalized and a lot more standardized,
(04:30):
and really most of the time overseen by like a
white medical establishment. So anyone who was not white and
was wanting to be a nurse or a midwife or
a doctor was like increasingly funneled into a pretty racist
(04:54):
formalized system, which in a lot of care just wound
up with people not having access to work that they
had already been doing and had already been trained in. Right,
So like people who had who had been working as
nurses for many years, who had you know, learned to
(05:15):
be nurses before there were formal nursing programs, like no
longer being able to practice nurses after this became more
formalized and standardized. And I feel like a lot of
this is really complicated because, on the one hand, there
are a lot of things that have gone on in
the world of medicine, some of which we've talked about
(05:36):
on the show before, that were like not evidence based,
were not helping people in some cases, were harming people,
and evolving into a more formalized profession did not totally
get rid of that by any stretch of the imagination
at all, but did sort of put some guardrails around that.
(05:58):
But then just also let to like a lot of
loss of community knowledge. We did a whole episode that
you researched about the Flexner Report that was a report
into the status of medical education that in the aftermath
that led to a lot of the schools that were
(06:19):
training black doctors being shut down, and they're just like,
weren't any anymore. So it's like simultaneously she broke a
lot of ground and achieved a lot of firsts and
then clearly worked in a very needed role in her community.
As the world was changing in this way that kind
(06:40):
of forced everyone who wasn't white into the margins as
these institutions became more formalized and standardized that associated with
like universities and colleges rather than learning doing as someone's apprentice,
(07:02):
if that makes sense. So yeah, I feel like there
are complicated things around all of that. Well, and the
hard part, right is that when we're looking at I mean,
it is hard enough when scenarios like that play out
in the modern world to tease apart all of the
moving parts that are going on, and like when there
(07:24):
are scenarios where racism or bias is driving the bus
in terms of how a decision has gotten made versus
those occasions when there actually is like a problem of
the knowledge that isn't maybe accurate or correct. That's hard
enough if it plays out today. So when we're looking
back at stuff like this, it's like you really have
(07:49):
to have no assumptions of accuracy of almost anything you
look at, because everybody who wrote a piece of paper
about it had unconscious bias, right, because we all do. Yeah,
but we weren't even aware of the concept of unconscious mind.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Yeah, Like it gets very very tricky.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Yeah, yeah, so much baby talk. Also, apparently I should
be you know, as a woman of a certain age,
I should be avoiding excitement. Yeah, I got to the
So I love reading her book. There are things in
it where I'm like, yeah, absolutely, we need better ventilation
and buildings. That's that's certainly true. But like, for example,
(08:35):
the parts where she was talking about basically people working
themselves to death to make ends meet did kind of
come off as sort of saying you should not do that,
when it's like, okay, but with what resources? Right? How?
How how does the family eat them? Yeah, and the
(08:56):
advice about menopause, I was like, you're not I'm not
giving up spices right, not a thing I would ever
be willing to do as I approach the age of fifty.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
So yeah, her.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Her book is so clearly influenced by, you know, her
own experience of many years of working with babies and
mothers especially, And then also occasionally I would read something
a goo, oh no, that's we know today, that's not
how that works. Yeah, yeah, I mean I also write
(09:38):
like it's there's a little bit of relief, is not it,
But there's a little bit of like, oh. We often
talk about how things you think are very much part
of the modern world have actually been playing out forever
and ever and ever, and it's like, this is like,
you know, more than one hundred and twenty thirty years ago,
and yet there was already this idea that people work
(10:00):
too much, which we are still constantly discussing culturally, like
about how unhealthy it is to work too much. And
I'm like, well, on the one hand, it stinks that
we still haven't figured this biz out, and on the
other hand, it's oddly reassuring that this has always been
a problem and we've for the most part managed to
endure at least one To look at the whole of
(10:24):
humanity but also I think we should all not work
as much. But again, oh, yes, we also all need
to eat and have the necessities that enable us to live.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
I had some similar thoughts about her feelings about children
who were, in her mind, too young to be going
to school because of the health effects of that, and
I was like, man, this is a debate that we're
still having about. Like I know so many parents of
little kids who are like, yes, school starts, and it's
just like continual illness. Yeah, but like the benefit of
(11:02):
being in school, Like there's a whole different benefit involving
like learning and socialization with your peers and all of
that kind of stuff. And like, I don't know all
of those decisions, I am not remotely qualified to weigh
in on. But I was like, yeah, I still see
this these conversations happening today about like kids in school
(11:27):
and daycare and getting sick. But like, then there's a
different benefit to being in school besides the illness part. Yeah.
And to further complicated, there is no one right answer
for all kids either, right, right, Some kids will do
better going earlier, some kids will do better going later.
And so when everybody's trying to make a blanket regulation set.
(11:49):
It's like it doesn't really work the complexities of human
life as mirrored throughout history. So yeah, I am glad
that I finally got to do the episode on her.
Do you still kind of wish the order had been
(12:11):
magically slightly different? And I had known that there was
a need to maybe go to a university library in
Philadelphia while I was there. I mean we could always
have a follow up.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Yeah, but then I would have to go back to Philadelphia.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Okay, it is. It was a fun trip. I've said
that last time. I definitely enjoyed it. This week we
talked about Measles. We've talked before about how I loved
(12:49):
the podcast Saw Bones. Yeah, they did an episode on measles.
I am pretty sure in twenty fifteen, as the Disneyland
outbreak was happening. Oh yeah, but it had a very
similar like there's a bunch of measles outbreaks happening kind
of introductory material. Uh, I feel a little I don't
(13:16):
feel exactly the same about Measles in terms of conversations
about it recently. Is it did about scarlet fever? Because
with scarlet fever, a lot of people when scarlet fever
comes up, it feels like an old timey Victorian era
not around any more disease, which that's not the case.
We talked about that in that whole episode. Even though
(13:38):
I don't think I personally know anyone who has had
the measles, measles doesn't strike me in quite that way,
just because there have been so many outbreaks, Like the
number of outbreaks have increased recently, But when I was born,
people were recommended to get one dose of vaccine, and
(14:01):
then the recommendation was increased to a second dose that
some time later. I didn't look up the exact but
like there was a recommendation for people to have a
second dose, in part because like it just increases the
efficacy a little bit more, hoping to cut down on
the number of outbreaks. So this recommendation for the second
dose happened in nineteen eighty nine. I got that second
(14:22):
dose when I was in my early teen years because
we were going to go visit my grandmother and there
was an active outbreak happening in the town where she lived.
So my mom took me to the pediatrician to get
dose number two of MMR vaccine, and that led to
(14:44):
an awkward conversation because generally, again I'm not a doctor,
not medical advice. It is not advised though, for people
to get the MMR vaccine during pregnancy of the potential
for congenital rebella syndrome. So my mom takes me to
(15:05):
the pediatrician and I'm what fourteen or fifteen maybe, and
the nurse asks me if I am on my period,
and I say no, And the nurse says, then I
can't give you the vaccine.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
In case you're pregnant, And I was.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
Like, no, unpossible, but like, what a weird jump. Well,
and they I understand the motivation, and I understand that
people's experiences happen at different times in their life, right,
(15:47):
But for me, at the age of fifteen, it was
not possible for me to have been pregnant. Well, I
mean my jump is like, why did she go right
there instead of are you sexually active? Yeah? But to
me that would have been in the more suitable question.
I don't know if there was like a medical like
if that was the sort of guidelines for how to
(16:08):
talk to people about it, but like, I think my
mom might have even warned me that this conversation might
happen but anyway, they did, though, give me my second
measles other sense, I guess it was MMR at that point,
after some conversation with my mom, I don't remember mine,
(16:29):
so I'm presuming I got it when I was little.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Yeah, well it's the first dose is.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Small children, not tiny tiny babies, because people have antibodies
from in utero, and I feel like it's some amount
of time later that the second dose is recommended. Again,
I did not look all this up. I'm not a doctor.
It's more about my awkward experience at the doctor's office,
as you know, an awkward fourteen or fifteen year old.
(16:59):
Another thing, whenever I'm working on this podcast and I'm
getting to read old, old documents that are scans of
things that are very old, and they have the long
s's in them that look like f's. That led to
some hilarity with this episode because there was some stuff
(17:22):
that I was wanting to look at that was very
long that I knew there was a section of that
was about measles specifically, but like, there wasn't a table
of contents that could or an index, Like there wasn't
a way that might guide me to that page. So
I was having to use the text search function, and
(17:45):
you know, with the long s's that looked like f's,
any kind of ocr that might have gone through there
to make it a machine readable document probably a little
off with the s's that look like f's. And so
what I discovered was that anytime I was trying to
look at these old documents, I needed to look for
(18:08):
me folsm A f l e s in case it
saw that, uh that s as an F. But I
also needed to look for mealies because some of them
had turned U m e A s l e S
into m e A l i e s. Oh yeah,
And that just became my I would look for both,
(18:31):
even though even if like even if me even if
mefals brought up results right away, I'd be like, let
me just check see if meales is in this one too.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Yeah, that was tricky.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
I forgot my level of iron about the Lancet paper
until we were talking about it, and it was like
the way a sense memory will come back and you're
just ready to spit nails all over again. I was
just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it wasn't just inaccurate, like
(19:15):
the way that it was described for a long time
was inaccurate and it was like fraudulent. Well, and I
still see people today who don't either don't know that
it was retracted or don't accept that as valid, still
trying to make that case that vaccines cause autism, and
(19:38):
I become so angry, so angry. I have layers of anger.
A lot of people in my life are like, Hey,
what you're telling me when you say this about vaccines
and autism is that you would rather have your child die.
And that is an unacceptable thing to say in a
(19:58):
number of ways. So yeah, yeah, I was not totally
like I didn't have the exact timeline in my head
of like when the paper came out, when that paper
got like so much traction, a lot of it being
like sort of celebrity endorsements of this paper.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Almost I didn't.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Realize that that was like two years before the United
States was declared measles free. And I had this moment
where I like silently gave thanks that that still happened
in the face of like such a big setback to
vaccine campaigns. Yeah, because it did, like it led to
(20:42):
people refusing a.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
Lot of vaccines.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Yeah, a lot of vaccines, like based on this paper
that was fraudulent, as we keep saying. So yeah, yeah,
I am glad to be vaccinated for measles, so that
when I come back from a place where there's a
measles outbreak happening, I'm not like, uh oh, I did
(21:09):
not pass through either of the airports that had the warnings,
and I did not go to the daycare in Philadelphia
where a lot of the cases were. You didn't go
to Disneyland in the twenty teens Disneyland outbreak. I mean, look,
I'm not a parent, so obviously I'm not an expert.
But I often see in disney parks or even places
(21:31):
like movie theaters people who come in with a baby
that is obviously in the category of newborn. Oh yeah,
and I'm always like, should you be out among the
unwashed masses? Like I don't the immunity of that infant
is not solidified yet. Yeah, is this really the smartest
(21:55):
thing to do? But again, I'm not a parent, and
that is also informed by my own bias of I'm
afraid of babies.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
So yeah, there's so.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
I don't remember the age that the first dose of
MMR vaccine, but.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
It might be like a year.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
Yeah, No, I have I recently on a trip to
Disney World, saw a very tiny baby that was not
a year by any means, Like I would be shocked
if it was more than a couple months. And I
was just like, did you book this trip not knowing
that you were expecting and then you decided to go anyway?
I don't, I don't know what happened. I don't.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
I'm scared.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Yeah, it's it's not my business. I try not to
be judging, but I'm also like, I don't know if
this is safe, and I get, you know, like contact anxiety.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Right.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
We had one trip to Disney in Orlando when I
was a child, which was a road trip taken by
my whole extended family on my dad's side and my
mom's for when we were old enough to do that
was we can all walk, that's smart. And there was
still debate about like were we going to be old
(23:11):
enough to remember the trip because like my mom was like,
this is probably the only time we're going to do this.
I don't want my children to go and be so
young that they don't remember this one once in a
lifetime for our family thing. So I was so I
guess I was five and my brother was three and
(23:34):
a half. We did not go in my family. No,
I was in No. No, that was a vacation was
for going to visit other relatives and revisit all of
your grudges. That was who vacation was for in my
family growing up, which is probably why I go to
Dissy World all the time now because yeah, I didn't
(23:56):
get this in my formative years that I wanted it.
So yeah, yeah. So you know, if you're preparing for
a vacation with your family, I hope those preparations are
going great. I know a lot of folks who were
about to go on the same trip in a couple
(24:17):
of weeks and they are all having the pre vacation
anxiety of getting everything done before you can go. So
if that's on your life plan coming up, I hope
it's going well. If you're not getting to take a vacation,
I hope you at least get to have a nap.
We will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow. We
(24:39):
will have a brand new episode on Monday. Stuff You
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio Happy Friday.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We talked about Rebecca Crumpler
this week. Sure did a topic that turned out to be.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Challenging. It a different way than I.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Expected because of all the baby discussion. Well, there is
a lot of baby discussion. Thank you for bearing with
the baby discussion, Holly.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
I know it's not your favorite.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
It's not the talking. I mean again, we know I
don't need to believe it, and I don't want anybody
who has and loves babies to feel weird. I just
like the discussion of baby care really squiggs me out.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Not for you, No, No.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
What turned out to be challenging was the amount of
information was fine, uh, but I kept finding like all
the sources would say the same thing, and I would
just sort of go, okay, but like, where is this
coming from?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Though?
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Like I kept seeing the same quote about the the
sort of reluctance to allow her to graduate from medical school,
which you can read as like I don't think she
had a ton of formal education and she definitely had
to take time off to care for her husband as
he was dying, and so like, I can imagine that
both of those things would have been caused for concern.
(01:33):
I can also imagine racism being prominently involved in the
decision making and how she was judged. But I just
kept going, okay, like this is clearly quoting from something.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
What are we quoting from?
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (01:54):
This led me down.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
I find I found like a place that had the actual,
like actual footnote of what, you know, what collection it
was in. And then that was a whole other little
rabbit hole because I did not write down who, like
which which collection this was said to be a part of.
(02:15):
But the university it was being held at is not
there anymore. Oh, it was absorbed by Drexel University. I
don't know if absorbed is the right. I did not
look into like the details of like how these universities
came under the same umbrella. But this is a thing
that sort of led me to wish that I had
(02:36):
a little time machine, because had things aligned differently while
I was on that trip to Philadelphia to see the
Marie Lawrence exhibit, I could have like extended my stay
by a day and see if I could go and
like get access to the actual file box of actual information,
(03:00):
which is a collection of information that was compiled by
somebody named Margaret Jaredo about I think specifically early black
women doctors, like early black women in the medical profession.
And I am very curious about what all else is
(03:25):
in that collection, and you know, it could be a
magic box of information and discovery. Uh, it does seem
to be something that was compiled with a lot of
care and attention and is now in the in the collection. Uh,
you know, it's there in the finding aid at Drexel University,
but not at a time that I could have gotten
(03:46):
to such a thing. And I was very late in
the research process when I finally like actually penned down
where we're quoting from on stuff something that I wanted
to note, but that I didn't put in the actual
episode because it's not directly related to her. So she
was the first black woman known to have earned an
(04:06):
MD in the United States. That is an achievement on
its own, earning a medical degree in general. But this
was also sort of at a very early time in
the process of things like nursing and midwiffery and medicine
becoming a lot more formalized and a lot more standardized,
(04:30):
and really most of the time overseen by like a
white medical establishment. So anyone who was not white and
was wanting to be a nurse or a midwife or
a doctor was like increasingly funneled into a pretty racist
(04:54):
formalized system, which in a lot of care just wound
up with people not having access to work that they
had already been doing and had already been trained in. Right,
So like people who had who had been working as
nurses for many years, who had you know, learned to
(05:15):
be nurses before there were formal nursing programs, like no
longer being able to practice nurses after this became more
formalized and standardized. And I feel like a lot of
this is really complicated because, on the one hand, there
are a lot of things that have gone on in
the world of medicine, some of which we've talked about
(05:36):
on the show before, that were like not evidence based,
were not helping people in some cases, were harming people,
and evolving into a more formalized profession did not totally
get rid of that by any stretch of the imagination
at all, but did sort of put some guardrails around that.
(05:58):
But then just also let to like a lot of
loss of community knowledge. We did a whole episode that
you researched about the Flexner Report that was a report
into the status of medical education that in the aftermath
that led to a lot of the schools that were
(06:19):
training black doctors being shut down, and they're just like,
weren't any anymore. So it's like simultaneously she broke a
lot of ground and achieved a lot of firsts and
then clearly worked in a very needed role in her community.
As the world was changing in this way that kind
(06:40):
of forced everyone who wasn't white into the margins as
these institutions became more formalized and standardized that associated with
like universities and colleges rather than learning doing as someone's apprentice,
(07:02):
if that makes sense. So yeah, I feel like there
are complicated things around all of that. Well, and the
hard part, right is that when we're looking at I mean,
it is hard enough when scenarios like that play out
in the modern world to tease apart all of the
moving parts that are going on, and like when there
(07:24):
are scenarios where racism or bias is driving the bus
in terms of how a decision has gotten made versus
those occasions when there actually is like a problem of
the knowledge that isn't maybe accurate or correct. That's hard
enough if it plays out today. So when we're looking
back at stuff like this, it's like you really have
(07:49):
to have no assumptions of accuracy of almost anything you
look at, because everybody who wrote a piece of paper
about it had unconscious bias, right, because we all do. Yeah,
but we weren't even aware of the concept of unconscious mind.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Yeah, Like it gets very very tricky.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Yeah, yeah, so much baby talk. Also, apparently I should
be you know, as a woman of a certain age,
I should be avoiding excitement. Yeah, I got to the
So I love reading her book. There are things in
it where I'm like, yeah, absolutely, we need better ventilation
and buildings. That's that's certainly true. But like, for example,
(08:35):
the parts where she was talking about basically people working
themselves to death to make ends meet did kind of
come off as sort of saying you should not do that,
when it's like, okay, but with what resources? Right? How?
How how does the family eat them? Yeah, and the
(08:56):
advice about menopause, I was like, you're not I'm not
giving up spices right, not a thing I would ever
be willing to do as I approach the age of fifty.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
So yeah, her.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Her book is so clearly influenced by, you know, her
own experience of many years of working with babies and
mothers especially, And then also occasionally I would read something
a goo, oh no, that's we know today, that's not
how that works. Yeah, yeah, I mean I also write
(09:38):
like it's there's a little bit of relief, is not it,
But there's a little bit of like, oh. We often
talk about how things you think are very much part
of the modern world have actually been playing out forever
and ever and ever, and it's like, this is like,
you know, more than one hundred and twenty thirty years ago,
and yet there was already this idea that people work
(10:00):
too much, which we are still constantly discussing culturally, like
about how unhealthy it is to work too much. And
I'm like, well, on the one hand, it stinks that
we still haven't figured this biz out, and on the
other hand, it's oddly reassuring that this has always been
a problem and we've for the most part managed to
endure at least one To look at the whole of
(10:24):
humanity but also I think we should all not work
as much. But again, oh, yes, we also all need
to eat and have the necessities that enable us to live.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
I had some similar thoughts about her feelings about children
who were, in her mind, too young to be going
to school because of the health effects of that, and
I was like, man, this is a debate that we're
still having about. Like I know so many parents of
little kids who are like, yes, school starts, and it's
just like continual illness. Yeah, but like the benefit of
(11:02):
being in school, Like there's a whole different benefit involving
like learning and socialization with your peers and all of
that kind of stuff. And like, I don't know all
of those decisions, I am not remotely qualified to weigh
in on. But I was like, yeah, I still see
this these conversations happening today about like kids in school
(11:27):
and daycare and getting sick. But like, then there's a
different benefit to being in school besides the illness part. Yeah.
And to further complicated, there is no one right answer
for all kids either, right, right, Some kids will do
better going earlier, some kids will do better going later.
And so when everybody's trying to make a blanket regulation set.
(11:49):
It's like it doesn't really work the complexities of human
life as mirrored throughout history. So yeah, I am glad
that I finally got to do the episode on her.
Do you still kind of wish the order had been
(12:11):
magically slightly different? And I had known that there was
a need to maybe go to a university library in
Philadelphia while I was there. I mean we could always
have a follow up.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Yeah, but then I would have to go back to Philadelphia.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Okay, it is. It was a fun trip. I've said
that last time. I definitely enjoyed it. This week we
talked about Measles. We've talked before about how I loved
(12:49):
the podcast Saw Bones. Yeah, they did an episode on measles.
I am pretty sure in twenty fifteen, as the Disneyland
outbreak was happening. Oh yeah, but it had a very
similar like there's a bunch of measles outbreaks happening kind
of introductory material. Uh, I feel a little I don't
(13:16):
feel exactly the same about Measles in terms of conversations
about it recently. Is it did about scarlet fever? Because
with scarlet fever, a lot of people when scarlet fever
comes up, it feels like an old timey Victorian era
not around any more disease, which that's not the case.
We talked about that in that whole episode. Even though
(13:38):
I don't think I personally know anyone who has had
the measles, measles doesn't strike me in quite that way,
just because there have been so many outbreaks, Like the
number of outbreaks have increased recently, But when I was born,
people were recommended to get one dose of vaccine, and
(14:01):
then the recommendation was increased to a second dose that
some time later. I didn't look up the exact but
like there was a recommendation for people to have a
second dose, in part because like it just increases the
efficacy a little bit more, hoping to cut down on
the number of outbreaks. So this recommendation for the second
dose happened in nineteen eighty nine. I got that second
(14:22):
dose when I was in my early teen years because
we were going to go visit my grandmother and there
was an active outbreak happening in the town where she lived.
So my mom took me to the pediatrician to get
dose number two of MMR vaccine, and that led to
(14:44):
an awkward conversation because generally, again I'm not a doctor,
not medical advice. It is not advised though, for people
to get the MMR vaccine during pregnancy of the potential
for congenital rebella syndrome. So my mom takes me to
(15:05):
the pediatrician and I'm what fourteen or fifteen maybe, and
the nurse asks me if I am on my period,
and I say no, And the nurse says, then I
can't give you the vaccine.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
In case you're pregnant, And I was.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
Like, no, unpossible, but like, what a weird jump. Well,
and they I understand the motivation, and I understand that
people's experiences happen at different times in their life, right,
(15:47):
But for me, at the age of fifteen, it was
not possible for me to have been pregnant. Well, I
mean my jump is like, why did she go right
there instead of are you sexually active? Yeah? But to
me that would have been in the more suitable question.
I don't know if there was like a medical like
if that was the sort of guidelines for how to
(16:08):
talk to people about it, but like, I think my
mom might have even warned me that this conversation might
happen but anyway, they did, though, give me my second
measles other sense, I guess it was MMR at that point,
after some conversation with my mom, I don't remember mine,
(16:29):
so I'm presuming I got it when I was little.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Yeah, well it's the first dose is.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Small children, not tiny tiny babies, because people have antibodies
from in utero, and I feel like it's some amount
of time later that the second dose is recommended. Again,
I did not look all this up. I'm not a doctor.
It's more about my awkward experience at the doctor's office,
as you know, an awkward fourteen or fifteen year old.
(16:59):
Another thing, whenever I'm working on this podcast and I'm
getting to read old, old documents that are scans of
things that are very old, and they have the long
s's in them that look like f's. That led to
some hilarity with this episode because there was some stuff
(17:22):
that I was wanting to look at that was very
long that I knew there was a section of that
was about measles specifically, but like, there wasn't a table
of contents that could or an index, Like there wasn't
a way that might guide me to that page. So
I was having to use the text search function, and
(17:45):
you know, with the long s's that looked like f's,
any kind of ocr that might have gone through there
to make it a machine readable document probably a little
off with the s's that look like f's. And so
what I discovered was that anytime I was trying to
look at these old documents, I needed to look for
(18:08):
me folsm A f l e s in case it
saw that, uh that s as an F. But I
also needed to look for mealies because some of them
had turned U m e A s l e S
into m e A l i e s. Oh yeah,
And that just became my I would look for both,
(18:31):
even though even if like even if me even if
mefals brought up results right away, I'd be like, let
me just check see if meales is in this one too.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Yeah, that was tricky.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
I forgot my level of iron about the Lancet paper
until we were talking about it, and it was like
the way a sense memory will come back and you're
just ready to spit nails all over again. I was
just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it wasn't just inaccurate, like
(19:15):
the way that it was described for a long time
was inaccurate and it was like fraudulent. Well, and I
still see people today who don't either don't know that
it was retracted or don't accept that as valid, still
trying to make that case that vaccines cause autism, and
(19:38):
I become so angry, so angry. I have layers of anger.
A lot of people in my life are like, Hey,
what you're telling me when you say this about vaccines
and autism is that you would rather have your child die.
And that is an unacceptable thing to say in a
(19:58):
number of ways. So yeah, yeah, I was not totally
like I didn't have the exact timeline in my head
of like when the paper came out, when that paper
got like so much traction, a lot of it being
like sort of celebrity endorsements of this paper.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Almost I didn't.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Realize that that was like two years before the United
States was declared measles free. And I had this moment
where I like silently gave thanks that that still happened
in the face of like such a big setback to
vaccine campaigns. Yeah, because it did, like it led to
(20:42):
people refusing a.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
Lot of vaccines.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Yeah, a lot of vaccines, like based on this paper
that was fraudulent, as we keep saying. So yeah, yeah,
I am glad to be vaccinated for measles, so that
when I come back from a place where there's a
measles outbreak happening, I'm not like, uh oh, I did
(21:09):
not pass through either of the airports that had the warnings,
and I did not go to the daycare in Philadelphia
where a lot of the cases were. You didn't go
to Disneyland in the twenty teens Disneyland outbreak. I mean, look,
I'm not a parent, so obviously I'm not an expert.
But I often see in disney parks or even places
(21:31):
like movie theaters people who come in with a baby
that is obviously in the category of newborn. Oh yeah,
and I'm always like, should you be out among the
unwashed masses? Like I don't the immunity of that infant
is not solidified yet. Yeah, is this really the smartest
(21:55):
thing to do? But again, I'm not a parent, and
that is also informed by my own bias of I'm
afraid of babies.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
So yeah, there's so.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
I don't remember the age that the first dose of
MMR vaccine, but.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
It might be like a year.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
Yeah, No, I have I recently on a trip to
Disney World, saw a very tiny baby that was not
a year by any means, Like I would be shocked
if it was more than a couple months. And I
was just like, did you book this trip not knowing
that you were expecting and then you decided to go anyway?
I don't, I don't know what happened. I don't.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
I'm scared.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Yeah, it's it's not my business. I try not to
be judging, but I'm also like, I don't know if
this is safe, and I get, you know, like contact anxiety.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Right.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
We had one trip to Disney in Orlando when I
was a child, which was a road trip taken by
my whole extended family on my dad's side and my
mom's for when we were old enough to do that
was we can all walk, that's smart. And there was
still debate about like were we going to be old
(23:11):
enough to remember the trip because like my mom was like,
this is probably the only time we're going to do this.
I don't want my children to go and be so
young that they don't remember this one once in a
lifetime for our family thing. So I was so I
guess I was five and my brother was three and
(23:34):
a half. We did not go in my family. No,
I was in No. No, that was a vacation was
for going to visit other relatives and revisit all of
your grudges. That was who vacation was for in my
family growing up, which is probably why I go to
Dissy World all the time now because yeah, I didn't
(23:56):
get this in my formative years that I wanted it.
So yeah, yeah. So you know, if you're preparing for
a vacation with your family, I hope those preparations are
going great. I know a lot of folks who were
about to go on the same trip in a couple
(24:17):
of weeks and they are all having the pre vacation
anxiety of getting everything done before you can go. So
if that's on your life plan coming up, I hope
it's going well. If you're not getting to take a vacation,
I hope you at least get to have a nap.
We will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow. We
(24:39):
will have a brand new episode on Monday. Stuff You
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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