Table Talk

     My wife and I both read from a wide range of material, both for entertainment as well as for information. Sometimes we write narratives based on our findings and interpretations. Mary is a genealogist studying historical roots for both her ancestors from Ukraine as well as mine from Ukraine, Norway, and Sweden. I’m just an amateur historian reading and thinking about a variety of topics, mostly in the successes and failures of frontiersmen and pioneers in our area.

     Mary’s mother lived through the world-wide diphtheria epidemic of 1927 and at times recounted many memories of it. Presently it’s a topic often discussed at our dinner table. She now refers to notes she made for an article she is writing to submit to an organization journal. Since I’m her editor-in-chief, I’ve read and reread it a few times, sometimes adding my two cents’ worth. From those pages quite a story emerges from a rural Germans from Russia community.

     First off, we’ll set the scene in a rural community inhabited by first generation immigrant Germans from Russia who came to America to escape harsh realities in Russia. People started getting sick here, children were dying, but doctors were not available. Furthermore, it had been instilled in the G-R people to not trust people in authority because of the power they held over their lives.

     One man walked several times over hills through deep snow to come to Mary’s grandparents farm home with the request of asking the grandfather to make wooden coffins for each of his kids who had died. The only material available to craft them with were the wooden bin boards in his little granary. A doctor had not been called to attend to them when they grew sick. Furthermore, they didn’t think one would come to people with their old world ways when asked.

     Some enlightened folks with a more forward-looking  attitude toward medical science had failed to find a doctor who would visit. Why not try their newly learned procedure in the United States of asking an elected official to aid them? A group of them went to the county’s state attorney for help. What leverage he may have had over a doctor isn’t clear and probably did not exist. Maybe he just made a friendly request of one he knew, but whatever he did, a doctor did come down to give aid.

     The aid came in the form of vaccinations for those who would submit to the needle in their arm. Negative reactions to modern science weren’t just restricted to that community of German-Russians. Come closer to home and find a story like it among Norwegian settlers in the Owego settlement. In a paper read to an old settlers picnic in Sheldon, Mrs. A. L. Treat wrote in the winter of 1884 that smallpox broke out in the Owego settlement. Mr. Knutson’s family were the first to suffer. Two boys died, but two other members of the family recovered. Dr. Capehart from Fargo was sent out to vaccinate everyone. The doctor dined at F. W. Baguhn’s and went to the home of Mr. Thiergart next. Mrs. Thiergart objected to the shot in her arm, but her husband cried out, “Katherina, you must come down, the doctor is here, and he says you must get ‘waxmenated.’ There is no use, you must come down.” After much coaxing, Katherina was “waxmenated.”

     The G-R part of this story referred to the diphtheria pandemic, the Owego segment was smallpox, and now we face a virus called Covid-19. Several scientists work at finding a vaccine for it, and whomever first discovers it will surely be noted in the history books.

     Edward Jenner is considered the founder of vaccinology in the West in 1796, after he inoculated a 13 year-old-boy with vaccinia virus simply known as cowpox, and demonstrated immunity to smallpox. It may have been due to someone observing the fact that milkmaids who had contracted the mild cowpox seemed to have resistance to smallpox.

     Over a century ago, a German physiologist named Emil von Behring won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1901 for his discovery of a diphtheria antitoxin. It must have been a relief for the general population who were ready to accept it. The problem at the time was that plenty of anti-vaxxers didn’t receive a shot, so the disease kept running through many sections of the country.

     Whenever a vaccine for Covid-19 comes on the market that science says is effective, I will be standing in line for a shot, even though I know there are plenty of anti-vaxxers who won’t. I want to shed my mask.

You can email me with comments to this address -  lynn.bueling@gmail.com