GR: Childhood illnesses
Written by Line
(10/29/2003 7:26 p.m.)
At school the risk of infection was ever-present; the irruption of fever at the boys' school in Cheam provoked a frantic dash to withdraw the children. Even today, a school is an excellent place for a child to pick up whatever infection is going around. I really wonder how 18th-century parents could bear to send their children to boarding school! Further down the page, it says: ...the Greene family apprehensively experimented with inoculation for smallpox convinced of the *inefficacy* of vaccination, only to see their darling baby daughter suffer horribly. I'm not quite clear as to whether they did or didn't have their daughter vaccinated. Were they upset because they had her vaccinated and she had a bad reaction, or because they didn't have her vaccinated and she later came down with the disease? |
