![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
history moves fast
Sep. 9th, 2026 01:00 pmRemember the chapter in All of a Kind Family where 4 of the sisters get scarlet fever and need to be quarantined? That was historical fiction, set decades before we had antibiotics. That was part of what made it so fascinating...that peek into how people used to feel, how they used to act, in the face of something I had never encountered because it was gone.
I was sitting here entering children's books into Library Thing when I ran across "Arthur's Chicken Pox." It's a picture book about a child (well, an aardvark. But an aardvark who goes to elementary school as a pupil rather than as a pet.) He catches the chicken pox like I did in the 1970s, when most kids caught chicken pox and were itchy and miserable for a week or so and had to stay home until they weren't contagious. Only Arthur is not a child of the 1970s...this book was written in 1994, ten years after it became routine (required?) to vaccinate American children against chicken pox. Most of the children reading this book when it came out never caught chicken pox and never would, they would not even meet a child who had it.
I was sitting here entering children's books into Library Thing when I ran across "Arthur's Chicken Pox." It's a picture book about a child (well, an aardvark. But an aardvark who goes to elementary school as a pupil rather than as a pet.) He catches the chicken pox like I did in the 1970s, when most kids caught chicken pox and were itchy and miserable for a week or so and had to stay home until they weren't contagious. Only Arthur is not a child of the 1970s...this book was written in 1994, ten years after it became routine (required?) to vaccinate American children against chicken pox. Most of the children reading this book when it came out never caught chicken pox and never would, they would not even meet a child who had it.
