Measles is very much in the news lately, so I feel compelled to write about it. Nope, I’m not going to get into the vaccination discussion; Instead, I’m going to tell you how measles changed history and impacted our lives in ways we don’t realize.

It was not until 1963 that a licensed vaccine was available. So, for most of us, measles is a distant threat. We don’t remember having it or seeing it. But for people from earlier eras, that was not the case. Measles has inflicted itself upon humans for millennia; there are descriptions of people sick with what was probably a precursor of measles as early as 300 AD. Around 900 AD, the Persian physician Rhazes described it as a disease distinct from smallpox and chickenpox. For centuries, measles has been endemic and epidemic, killing millions.

If you enjoy studying royal history, you learn that royal family trees have been greatly impacted by measles. For example, in 1712, Marie Adelaide, Dauphine of France, died of measles. Her husband, Louis, Dauphin (heir apparent) of France, had stayed by her side while she was ill. He died of measles six days after she did. Their son Louis became the Dauphin, but alas, he died of measles three weeks later. (Actually, he probably died because the doctors bled him repeatedly.) His younger brother, now the Dauphin, also developed measles. The governess refused to allow the doctors to bleed him, locking him, herself and three maids into a closet. He survived and became King Louis XV.

In 1824, the young King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamamalu of Hawaii journeyed to London to seek an audience with King George IV to negotiate an alliance with England. Virtually the entire Hawaiian royal party developed measles, days after visiting the Royal Military Asylum, an orphanage for hundreds of soldiers’ children. (Before 1848 measles was unknown in Hawaii, so they were all quite susceptible.) Both the King and Queen died, before they had even had an audience with King George. Over the next one hundred years, as Hawaii’s trade with the rest of the world increased, there were multiple epidemics of measles (as well as syphilis, tuberculosis, mumps, hepatitis) in Hawaii with devastating consequences. Hawaii’s population plummeted from approximately 300,000 at Captain Cook’s arrival in 1778 to 54,000 in 1876. Measles and other infectious diseases changed the fabric of Hawaiian society forever.

Then there is Mark Twain’s story. He often said he would not have been a writer if it hadn’t been for measles. In 1847, when he was twelve, measles swept through Hannibal, Missouri. He just knew he would catch it and die, and he couldn’t stand the suspense. So, he snuck out of the house one night and got into bed with a playmate who had measles. Of course, he caught it, was sick for two weeks, and recovered. In his own word, “This was a turning point in my life…For when I got well my mother closed my school career and apprenticed me to a printer…I…began to add one link after another to the chain which was to lead me into the literary profession. I can say with truth that the reason I am in the literary profession is because I had the measles when I was twelve years old.”

The measles was still quite present and common in the 1960s. If you went to Kent State University in 1966, you may have heard the band The Measles play in concert. Never heard of them? Their lead singer, Joe Walsh, was later in The James Gang and The Eagles. But it all started with The Measles!

I am particularly moved by the sad story of Roald Dahl. Beloved author of children’s books such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, he had a daughter, Olivia, who contracted measles in 1962. She was not particularly ill, and seemed to have a typical case. As Dahl wrote,

“…I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.

‘Are you feeling all right?’ I asked her.

‘I feel all sleepy,’ she said.

In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.”

Olivia had developed the dreaded complication measles encephalitis. Dahl became an outspoken proponent of vaccination, once the vaccine was available. He dedicated two of his books, James and the Giant Peach and The BFG, to Olivia’s memory. He said, “You will see her name at the beginning of each of these books. And I know how happy she would be if only she could know that her death had helped to save a good deal of illness and death among other children.”

Did you watch The Brady Bunch in the 1960s? In a 1969 episode, “Is There a Doctor in the House?”, the whole family gets measles. Because it is TV Land, nobody is very ill. They sit around playing Monopoly, gloat about not having to take any medicine or shots, and generally enjoy staying out of school. In fact, Marcia says, “If you have to get sick, sure can’t beat the measles.”. This episode is still referenced by current day activists against vaccines as an example of how mild measles is. In reality, Maureen McCormick, the actor who played Marcia as a teen, was furious when she discovered anti-vaccine groups were circulating memes of her with measles from that episode. She had measles as a child, and reports it was not like the mild illness depicted on the TV show. She was significantly ill. And she remains a strong proponent of vaccination.

In 1969, the year of that Brady Bunch TV episode, there were more than 25,000 US measles cases and forty-one deaths. And this was six years after the vaccine had been developed. Over the next two decades, measles infections and deaths dropped precipitously as immunization levels went up. By 1984 there was just one death from measles, a far cry from the five hundred deaths/year prior to the vaccine.

In 2023 there were over 100,000 deaths from measles, globally, mostly children under five years of age in low and middle-income countries. Who knows how history will change because they are gone? Who knows what those people could have accomplished with the rest of their lives, had they lived….

Oops. I did talk about vaccines….sorry, not sorry!