The March 2022 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, with an article on the whooping cough vaccine, brought back a couple of memories for me, one that seems incompatible with the scholarly reputation of the publication.
The first memory came from a silly camp song that Daddy quoted. (Thankfully, he didn’t try to sing it.) I am guessing he learned it from his father who was a fiddler in the Appalachian tradition. Daddy did a mimic of the “whoops,” and we joined him in the silliness. Several renderings of this exist, according to Google, but this is the way I remember his version.
“Way down yonder,
Not so very far off,
A jaybird died with the whooping cough.
He whooped so hard with the whooping cough that
he whooped his head and his tail right off.”
That was a fun take on the whooping cough. My second memory is no fun at all and lies more in keeping with the Smithsonian article and fills me with gratitude for Pearl Kendrick and Grace Elderling. I was six weeks old when I was gifted with the disease, either by an eleven-year-old aunt or a nine-year-old uncle. Obviously, I don’t remember that part, but the story was repeated regularly as I caught childhood colds that resulted in repetition of the “whoop” every time I coughed. To borrow a bit from the current designation of long Covid with its residual effects, I had “long whooping cough.”
Mama repeatedly told people how scared she was for her infant firstborn, even as she tried to convince them that this chronic “whoop” was an aftereffect of the disease and not the disease itself. I was only contagious for the cold, not a bout of whooping cough. I was about ten years old before I outgrew the whoop, but I still have vivid memories of the coughing pain that seemed to begin in my chest and go all the way to my toes.
So, my thanks to Pearl and Grace, bacteriologists who flaunted the cultural expectation of them serving as teachers until they could find a husband. According to the article, part of Grace’s motivation was her memory of those terrifying coughing fits in her own childhood. They persevered despite intense criticism and formed a pathway to a vaccine for pertussis, the “p” in the DPT that prevented my children and multitudes of others from having the disease. In 1944 the American Medical Association added their vaccine to its recommended list, and cases dropped by half in that decade and down to ten per year by 1970. Most of today’s children (and maybe their parents) would have to ask Google to know what it is by either name.
I’m guessing the jaybird is beyond caring, but I am very grateful for these two women and their collaborators for making this generation ask the question, “What is whooping cough?”