The Pandemics of Earlier Days

Rosemary Lockwood Sprague and son Ray during the summer of 1958

Viewing disease through the lens of family

We are entering what we hope will be the final phases of the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic, but our parents went through a number of global pandemics and events. My father—Raymond Arthur Sprague—lived through the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918, and was severely diminished by a virulent dose of rheumatic fever. It is important to note that the advancement of medicine has grown logarithmically in the last hundred years.

Whereas children now are inoculated at a very early age for disease such as pertussis, measles, and polio, my siblings and I grew up with these in our midst. Polio was the scariest. We went to school with kids whom had braces on nonfunctioning legs. We had seen the iron lung in pictures, and we lived through an outbreak of the disease in the mid-1950s.  I was very young; it was summer and our Ma made sure that we were a safely isolated as we could be. This was helped by the fact that we lived on a farm, but we were allowed to go nowhere. This meant that the only real inconvenience I suffered was that I was not allowed to travel to attend the annual Holstein Cattle Show. Truthfully I had very little interest in cattle, but whenever we went to a show my Ma would buy me an orange drink and a hot dog with diced onions, relish, and mustard. An epicurean treat, missed because of a polio outbreak: I must have been scarred emotionally, because I remember it to this day.

Along the road of life we three siblings missed catching pertussis (whooping cough) although we knew those that had it, and knew it was a pretty serious and miserable bug. We all survived the measles, chicken pox, and a myriad of colds and intestinal bugs. With luck we will add COVID-19 to that list.

Farmhand Willis Conard showing a Holstein from Midridge Farm at a cattle show in the 1950s