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\t\t<\/p>\nOn Sept. 23, I sat in a small glass reading room at Yale\u2019s medical library, turning the rag-paper pages of the Medical Dissenter, a London journal from the 1830s. At the bottom of one page, under the headline, \u201cReport from Mrs. Butt to Mr. Hudson,\u201d I met Jane Butt. Her letter was dated Sept. 23, 1834. I was reading it 192 years later to the day.<\/p>\n
Jane lived in the village of Broughton and explained that measles had spread through the children around her earlier that year. She described how one of her own children had caught it. She then reported 36 other cases in her community. Some, she noted, developed severe inflammation of the lungs, one of the complications that can make measles deadly. She believed a cold east wind aggravated their symptoms. Nevertheless, she reported, all of them recovered.<\/p>\n
Jane attributed the recoveries to Morison\u2019s pills. James Morison was a merchant with no medical training who believed that a purgative could expel \u201cimpure blood\u201d from the body and restore its natural balance. She administered the pills to the sick \u2014 sometimes twice a day \u2014 and gave as many as six at once to a toddler not yet 2 years old. She also gave the pills to women and, later, to their newborns, she wrote.<\/p>\n
Morison\u2019s followers called themselves Hygeists and attacked physicians as a monopoly that bled and poisoned its patients, which was not inaccurate in the 1830s. Much of medicine before the advent of germ theory and bacteriology provided incorrect diagnoses and problematic treatments.<\/p>\n
When Jane wrote her letter, women could not train as physicians and were being displaced as midwives by the growing professional authority of doctors. She lacked medical credentials or the authority that came with them, but the Hygeist movement gave her a platform and a space to speak. She said that because \u201cso much [was] said and done to prejudice the public mind against Mr. Morison\u2019s most invaluable medicine,\u201d she was left with no choice.<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\t\tHow knocking on doors can help beat measles \u2014 again<\/a><\/p>\n The journal that printed Jane\u2019s letter sold the cure she praised. The office of the Medical Dissenter on the Strand was one of Morison\u2019s official London depots for the pills in 1837. The same periodical mocked Edward Jenner, who had effectively used cowpox as a vaccination for smallpox, and ridiculed \u201cvaccinic mania.\u201d<\/p>\n After reading Jane\u2019s story, I pulled out my iPhone and took photos of it, which I turned into a PDF. As a historian of medicine, I have seen cases of measles often in historical sources from the Civil War to life among the poor in tenement houses, but when I read those cases measles had long been the province of the past.<\/p>\n As I read Jane\u2019s letter measles was back and raging in my home state of Pennsylvania, where six measles-associated deaths have been reported<\/a> and federal health officials have disputed how many of them to count. In 2026, the United States has already recorded<\/a> more than 4,500 measles cases, the largest number since 1991. Last school year,<\/a> a record 4.2% of kindergartners were exempted from at least one required vaccine, and coverage for the measles vaccine fell to 92.4%, below the level needed to keep outbreaks from spreading. In some communities, the percentages of children who are vaccinated are far lower.<\/a><\/p>\n The current explosion of measles in the present had changed how I see the past. I didn\u2019t preserve Jane\u2019s story to indict her or to provide an antecedent to the unfounded arguments against vaccination, which have directly harmed innocent children. I documented her story instead because I had just finished a book<\/a> on the ways ordinary people changed health care in the United States, and yet their stories have often been neglected, marginalized, or perceived to interfere with the real work of physicians. I wrote the book to show that medical knowledge is not an unalloyed concept created by professionals, but that ordinary people have continually provided evidence, offered interpretations, or even, in the case of Jane, simply counted the number of people who were sick in their communities.<\/p>\n Today, health populism takes shape in the Make America Healthy Again movement, which is rooted in part in grievances over how medical authority has dismissed patients, especially women.\u00a0According to Politico,<\/a> MAHA is \u201cmade up largely of women who followed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the MAGA fold.\u201d Many of these women are moms. MAHA has, in turn, capitalized on the chauvinism of medical authority that began nearly 200 years ago that dismissed women as caregivers and often neglected their insights, their concerns, and their fears about epidemics.<\/p>\n The very act of counting, which might seem obvious or like a natural response to an epidemic, was part of a broader movement that eventually provided a framework for public health. Long before epidemiology developed as a discipline, patients and practitioners observed contagion \u2014 that disease seemed to spread from person to person, through households and across villages and nations. Before there was an official public health authority to count, people counted. Counting was also a move toward empiricism. It offered a bird\u2019s-eye view of an epidemic and could provide local physicians or municipal authorities with some sense of the extent of an outbreak.<\/p>\n Counting mattered more than it might seem. Jane lived between two ways of explaining illness. In 1832, when a cholera pandemic reached New York City, clergy called for a national day of fasting and prayer. President Andrew Jackson refused to proclaim one, citing the separation of church and state, so states and churches held their own. Meanwhile, the city published daily counts of the sick and the dead. As the historian Charles Rosenberg showed in \u201cThe Cholera Years,\u201d Americans read the epidemic as a judgment on sin even as they tracked it case by case. Jane blamed the wind and thanked God for her family\u2019s recoveries, and she counted, reflecting the beginning of the shift from supernatural explanations to an empirical rationale. Documenting which children grew sickest and following an illness from house to house was a method aimed at articulating an explainable pattern. That method was not dissimilar to what physicians, ship surgeons, and military officials did in the first half of the 19th century when an epidemic erupted.<\/p>\n \t\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/GettyImages-2259640923-768x432.jpg\")
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