In Season 4 of the hit Netflix original Orange is the New Black, we get a glimpse into the healthcare […]
Contraception, Depression, and Who Bears the Burden of Unwelcome Side Effects
I started taking hormonal birth control pills in September 2015. That entire past summer, I had begun to experience some […]
India’s Commercialized Surrogacy: Blurring the Lines of Empowerment and Exploitation
Susheela, a woman from a small Indian village in western Uttar Pradesh, never imagined the day that she would help […]
Eggsploitation Cracked Open
“What’s a few eggs between friends?” Many egg donation advertisements, like the examples here, suggest that it’s nothing at all! […]
Fear-mongering from Anita Bryant to Houston’s Proposition 1
This post was originally published on February 1, 2016, during Nursing Clio’s Undergraduate Week, when we brought you amazing work […]
Finding a Voice: Agency and Trans Issues
It’s Undergraduate Week at Nursing Clio! All this week we are proud to bring you amazing work written by students […]
Pink Brain, Blue Brain: Do Opposites Attract?
It’s Undergraduate Week at Nursing Clio! All this week we are proud to bring you amazing work written by students […]
Femme Fixation and The Male Gaze
It’s Undergraduate Week at Nursing Clio! All this week we are proud to bring you amazing work written by students […]
The Resurgence of the Horrific, Harsh, and Ugly Reality of Childhood Diseases: The Inevitable Risk of Forgoing Vaccinations
By Natisha Robb
In “When the Personal Really is Historical (and Scary!),” Jacqueline Antonovich, a gender and medicine historian, described her 21st-century experience with pertussis, a.k.a. whooping cough, an extremely contagious “good old-fashioned Oregon Trail disease” that recently reemerged since its near eradication in the 1970s. While Antonovich suggests a recent surge in the anti-vaccine movement, records unveil a history fraught with ongoing controversy. Before vaccinations became a childhood rite of passage, every family knew someone who lost a child to a now vaccine-preventable disease. Yet despite the magnitude of casualties from smallpox, measles, polio, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis in populations lacking herd immunity, vulnerable communities did not always welcome vaccination campaigns with open arms.
A Tale of Two Diseases: ADHD and Neurasthenia
Consider two diseases: Disease A and Disease B. Children with Disease A are described as being “excitable” and “precocious,” at risk of being “overstimulated.” Thus, they are unable to balance “academic, intellectual, and physical growth.” [Schuster, 116] Children suffering from Disease B, on the other hand, are “active, restless, and fidgety” and have difficulty “sustaining attention to tasks, persistence of effort, or vigilance.” [Barkley, 57] At first glance, the symptoms of the two diseases in children seem oddly similar. Yet these are two wildly unique diseases that have never overlapped in time.
