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| It was the 1980s and this little girl always got sick. |
I have a little theory muddling around about nostalgia and
the various arguments against vaccination.
Yes, nostalgia.
With a measles outbreak in the USA now entering
Canada, not to mention mumps going round the players of the NHL (hope all those
boys are vaccinated, unless they don’t mind the potential side-effect of
sterility), there’s a lot about vaccines in the media at the moment. AS THERE
BLOODY WELL SHOULD BE. Marvels of modern medicine they are, and we should count
ourselves lucky that we live in a society that so freely gives them and also
allows the vanity of deciding not to have them. Yes, vanity.
But anyway, I don’t want to discuss the science or the pros
and cons. There is nothing to debate. Unless there is some medically
necessitous reason why your child cannot receive a vaccine, you should
vaccinate your children. And, if you don’t, I think you more than a little foolish,
certainly selfish, and agree with a recent article in the New Republic which says you’re an individualistic product of western capitalism.
Anyway, nostalgia. It’s a pretty powerful thing. The sense
of a pre-digital, pre-industrial, prelapsarian time when we were natural, and
children fought off illnesses because of their peck of dirt and healthy
constitutions. It’s bollocks of course, because you only need to go through a graveyard
to see the clusters of children buried during measles, diphtheria, and typhus
outbreaks. Often groups of children from one family, buried within weeks of
each other. The young adults who must have presumed they had dodged the
contagious illness bullet, only to be struck down horribly in their prime. Go graveyard visiting sometime - it ain’t fun. Also, if there is an old family photo of a relative who died in childhood, frame and hang it on your wall to remind you that although your grandparents may have lived hale and hearty lives, some of their siblings and cousins, and aunts and uncles did not.
However, we don’t do that. We think mostly of our own relatively
mild cases of measles and the week or so we had off school, maybe watching the
daytime soaps once we improved, and perhaps the trip to the toy shop we made
when we got better, forgetting that we were actually vaccinated, so our case of
measles was ridiculously mild compared with the full-blown disease, and we
haven’t the first clue what we’re talking about. That is actually my memory of
English measles at the age of nine. I don’t have to remember, like my parents’ generation,
children at school dying – I remember receiving a new Sylvanian Family toy.
SCORE! My memory of German Measles (Rubella), however, isn’t so complete. Why? I wasn’t vaccinated – you got the vaccine at 11 in those days - so I was
actually very sick. I also got a secondary infection, so I probably suffered from
delirium and don’t have pleasant days-off-school memories. Because being very
sick sucks.
Worse still, we think about literary instances like Esther
Summerson in Bleak House miraculously surviving the small pox. MIRACULOUSLY.
There’s a clue somewhere in that word. Or we have in the back of our minds the romantic trope of
illness and reconciliation, like Gilbert getting typhoid fever in Anne of the
Island, and Anne suddenly realising that it was always him just as she was
about to lose him. Gilbert “gets the turn” and recovers, but L.M. Montgomery
doesn’t go into detail about the four week course of the illness that would
have involved nearly a fortnight of raging fever; nor the dehydration, bleeding
and diarrhoea that would have left Gilbert practically skeletal from the inability
to consume anything. Montgomery didn’t need to because her audience understood.
Her audience realised that even once Gilbert was past the point of danger,
Anne wasn’t going near that place for another few weeks. There’s no rushing to
the bedside with typhoid.
Some of these illnesses, like typhoid, have been reduced by good hygiene and antibiotics, but the majority of those scourges of childhood have no treatment, and can only be prevented by the wonders of vaccines.
Anyway, I don’t condemn this nostalgia. We all love a happy ending, but these narratives are not
supposed to make us sentimental about illness, they’re meant to remind us how
fortunate we are to be alive. I also don’t condemn this nostalgia because I
experience it myself. I was a sick little girl for two months in 1985. I had an
extremely bad strain of glandular fever and spent a month in bed. I then spent
a second month recovering. I then spent another month slowly integrating back
into school. It took a full five years to get over the disease properly. In my
memory, those months were a golden autumn of kindly doctor attention, and days
lying in bed listening to the hits of the 50s, 60s, and 70s on the radio. Of
not having to go to school.
But, it’s important to remember that I wasn’t at risk of dying.
Not even close. This was the best kind of illness: all the days off school and
none of the stress; plenty of inconvenience for my parents, but none of the
desperate worry.
Nevertheless, the two songs I remember most from that time
are illuminating:
“Help me, help me, help me sail away. Well give me two good
reasons why I oughta stay.” [“Lazy Sunny Afternoon” The Kinks]
“Where do you go to, my lovely? When you’re alone in your
bed? Tell me the thoughts that surround you; I want to look inside your head,
yes I do.” [“Where do you go to my lovely” Peter Sarstedt]
Seven-year-olds aren’t very subtle, and maybe being sick wasn’t
as fun as I remember.
However, it makes for a good story. A story of being sick
and surviving, which can be so rare in our privileged times. Such stories have
cultural capital.
My aunt and my mother have such stories. Of almost dying
from now utterly avoidable childhood diseases – scarlet fever and polio, respectively.
They are their stories to tell, but they could be so easily manipulated into
the narratives of anti-vaccination. Or of tales about how the body heals itself
and we are all the stronger for it.
Of course they are not such stories; they are tales of the
wonders of modern medicine. Of the right doctors doing the right things when it
was so desperately required. They are tales of how the body survives, but there
is irreparable damage. They are tales of two women who nearly died from
childhood diseases, who subsequently have other desperate health stories to
tell you. How you fall victim to one serious illness and your body becomes more
and more susceptible to others. How one illness can lead to another your whole long
life.
So don’t fall victim to the nostalgic narrative that “we all had
measles as kids and we were fine.” We all didn’t. Some of us live with the ongoing repercussions of our illnesses. Some of us didn’t live to
tell that story at all.
Get your kids vaccinated for all our sakes.
