Vaccines During The 1800s

Vaccines Medicine has come a long way since the nineteenth century. Since the year of 1800 we now have anesthesia, vaccines, many prescription medicines, blood transfusions, organ transplants and many other things that save the lives of people everyday. One very popular medical improvement during the 1800s were vaccines. From 1798 to 2010 there were at least 49 vaccines produced. Vaccines can be used to cure or prevent many diseases that are could be very harmful to you. In the nineteenth century there were hardly any cures to many harmful diseases. “It is said that only those who have seen the beginning of things can understand the present. As the development of vaccines continues in the twenty-first century, and as it is now 215 years

“All states have mandatory vaccination laws for school children that include limited exemptions for religious, medical, or philosophical beliefs.” (Gale ⅓). Most people today in the United States “by his or her second birthday have received immunizations to protect him or her from mumps, measles, chicken pox, meningitis, and many other frightening diseases.” (Gale ⅓). Some people today would rather not get vaccinations because some of the illnesses that have vaccines made for them still occur today. “Although some people feel that vaccinations are unnecessary because outbreaks of serious diseases are rare, many vaccine- preventable diseases still exist in the world today.” (Gale ⅔) But many people do have their children and themselves vaccinated because they want to take any precautions to prevent the illnesses they could contract. “People who choose to vaccinate also feel that vaccines have been proven safe.” (Gale

Those vaccinations were for smallpox in 1798, Rabies in 1885, Typhoid in 1886, Cholera in 1896, and Plague in 1897. (Plotkin 890) These viruses caused the deaths of many family members and friends during the nineteenth century. “In the last decade of the nineteenth century, vaccine development started to have a rationale. The science was produced by workers in Great Britain, Germany, the United States, and Pasteur's laboratory in France. The key developments were methods to inactivate whole bacteria, which could then be used as vaccines, the discovery of bacterial toxins, the production of antitoxins and the realization that immune serum contained substances that neutralize toxins or bacterial replication.” (Plotkin 889) People started realizing that if they did not get these vaccines they were going to die or others were going to continue dying. They took getting vaccinations very seriously because they had lived through what it was like having no medicine or cures to these