Dooms,
“These diseases used to be listed in Medical Textbooks as BENIGN Childhood Diseases.”
Really? Do you have those textbooks? (or you are just quoting some website?)
I am sure that you will find just a fe quotes from the older textbooks of interest to you. For the record, measles is catagorized as a very serious disease in the older textbooks.
From the Critique 1905: (you can google the text and you will find this otherwise interesting older medical textbook).
“Measles is a dangerous disease-one of the most dangerous with which a child under five years of age can be attacked. It is especially apt to be fatal to teething children. It tends to kill by producing inflammation of the lungs. It prepares the way for consumption. It tends to maim by producing inflammations of the ears and eyes. Measles has carried off more than four times as many persons as enteric fever. It is therefore a great mistake to look upon measles as a trifling disease. Every child ill with measles ought at once to be put to bed and kept warm, for the mildest cases may be made serious by a chill. Measles is for this reason most dangerous in winter and spring. The older a child is, the less likely it is to catch measles, and if it does, the less likely it is to die. If every child could be protected from measles until It had passed its fifth year the mortality from this disease would be enormously decreased. It is therefore a great mistake – because as a rule children sooner or later have measles – to say, “The sooner the better,” and to take no measures to protect them, or even deliberately to expose them to infection.”
Thesis on Measles for the degree of doctor of medicine from the University of Edinburgh: 1908
“Measles is an acute, infectious, eruptive febrile
disease, which commences with marked catarrhal symptoms,
and later develops a characteristic rash of a maculopapular nature.
Its highly infectious character is particularly
noteworthy, as also its occurrence in childhood or near
the age of puberty. The eruption usually occurs about
the fourth day of the fever; and it can, in from thirty
to forty hours, be seen to have overspread. the entire
body of the patient – accompanying which phenomenon
will be observed catarrh of the air -passages and a
‘greater or less degree of pyrexia. Furthermore, there are
few individuals who escape the disease in early life,
though it is sometimes to be observed at a later period
– even in old -age .In the case of children especially,
it is apt to be a very dangerous disease – the more so
as mothers are apt to regard it as a malady from which
there can be no escape, and which, in view of its frequency, is comparatively harmless in its occurrence. ”
“The changes observed in the case of the lungs
appear to differ in no essential particulars from those
occurring in the course of other affections. Many of the
cases die from bronchopneumonia, which affection seems
to differ from that seen in other diseases in its
occasional greater tendency to suppuration; the outcome
of the malady is sometimes, too, a ford of caseous
pneumonia.Cornil and Babes (Quoted by Williams:- Trans.
‘fed.- Chir.Soc.,Vol.lxx.,p.77) insist upon the occurrence
of a peripneumonic or form of p4monary inflammation
peculiar to measles, and due to the direct action of the
specific poison; it is said to occur early in the so-called suffocative cases of the disease”
“The local action of the poison of measles sometimes results in disease of this organ: it usually takes
the form of a focal necrosis. Preeman (Med.Rec., 1898,
Vol.liv) observed this in about a third of all his
fatal cases of measles; and he reports that, as the
larger areas of necrosis are clearly distinguishable
by the naked eye,”
“The case’ of
measles without eruption reported by Rilliet (loc.cit . p.249) happened to be very severe, and occurred in a
child of twenty -one months of age infected from two
others in whom the disease had run a normal course.The
fever and concomitant catarrh were observed to be of the
ordinary kind; but, instead of the expected eruption
developing, double lobar pneumonia appeared on the
fourth day and spread very rapidly, the child dying on
the eighth day of the disease”
“According to the official returns,
in England and Wales from 1839- 1841, during the months
of January to march, there were 8106 fatal cases; from
April to June,8907; from July to September,6610; and from
October to December, there were 7213 deaths ”
“That certain forms of measles may take on a malignant tendency is the experience of almost everyone.
Edgar (lo c . cit .) ”