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Scars from a Childhood Disease: Measles in the Concentration Camps during the Boer War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Bruce Fetter  and
Stowell Kessler
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Extract

He had died ignominiously and swiftly of pneumonia following measles, without ever having gotten any closer to the Yankees than the camp in South Carolina.

(Mitchell 1960 [1936])

Writing for an American audience in the 1930s, Margaret Mitchell was able to dispatch the husband of Scarlett O’Hara with a certain irony. By then measles had become a childhood disease that was seldom fatal. During the nineteenth century, however, measles was not so lightly dismissed. Epidemics in populations with high proportions of susceptible individuals could be dangerous indeed. This article traces the history of measles in South Africa, showing how political and economic changes temporarily produced conditions that led to a devastating epidemic during the Boer War (1899–1902). It then compares the history of measles in South Africa with that in Great Britain and closes with a discussion of the relationship between human and biological causes in the history of the disease.

Type
Special Section
Information
Social Science History , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , Winter 1996 , pp. 593 - 611
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1996 

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