by Mary Nell Wegner
Globally
A Persian doctor in the 9th century named Rhazes, who was working as the chief physician at a hospital in Baghdad in the late 800s and early 900s, wrote the first known treatise on measles in his book al-Judari wa al-Hasbah, which was published in 910 and translated widely. [1]. Importantly, in his account of measles, he notes that it is critical to stay away from patients in order for the illness not to spread. In the 11th and 12th centuries, there are accounts of measles epidemics in Europe; Gerard of Cremona translated Rhazes’ work into Latin in the 13th century. In the Middle Ages, the Latin word “morbilli,” meaning “little disease,” was the preferred term used for measles and the illness was known to have occurred across South and East Asia, as well as India and China specifically. [2]. In the mid- to late-17th century, an English physician named Thomas Sydeham investigated the illness and described the disease in his book, On the Measles, published in 1693. From there, documentation of cases picked up across Europe into the 18th and 19th centuries. An American physician named Henry Koplik is credited with a complete clinical description of measles in 1896, with further pathogenesis described by a Belgian named Ludo van Bogaert in 1945. [3].
Finally, in the first half of the 20th century, mortality from measles began to decrease and, in retrospect, public health historians attribute this decline largely to better living conditions, including improved hygiene, nutrition, housing, and medical care.
In the United States
In America, measles was classified, in public health terms, as a “notifiable disease” in 1912 following the work done in 1911 by John Anderson and Joseph Goldberger who transmitted the disease using blood samples from infected people to rhesus monkeys, thus identifying the viral nature of the disease. [4]. Two Americans in Boston, John Franklin Enders (who went on to win the Nobel prize in medicine) and Thomas Chalmers Peebles visited a local elementary school with a measles outbreak in 1954, collected nasopharyngeal and blood samples from an 11-year-old child named David Edmonston, and “grew” the culture out on a human kidney cell he then injected into a monkey. The monkey developed a mild case of the measles with a rash. From this strain, originating with David Edmonstan, a live, attenuated vaccine was created and ultimately licensed in 1963. A trailblazer in vaccine development at Merck and Co. named Maurice Hilleman refined the measles vaccine in 1968 and then pioneered the combination of measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines in 1971. [5] Finland was the first country to eradicate measles in 1993.
Before the introduction of the vaccine, WHO estimates that there were about 30 million cases of measles a year, with at least two million fatalities. A disproportionate burden of those deaths occurred (and continue to occur) in the global South especially among children. The CDC notes that, in the ten years prior to the measles vaccine being distributed, more than three million Americans were infected annually, 48 thousand hospitalized, and approximately 500 killed by the measles. In 2000, the U.S. declared measles “eliminated,” a public health classification when there is “no continuous spread” of a disease for a 12-month period which, in retrospect, seems an elusive goal given the current situation. As French physician, microbiologist and scholar Patrick Berche notes, “We are still a long way from eradicating a disease against which we have all the means to make it disappear.”
In New Mexico
As with smallpox and other infectious diseases, it is likely European colonizers were the first to bring measles to New Mexico. The “Columbian exchange,” (named after Christopher Columbus) which began in the late 15th century, brought not only additional people, ideas, and goods to the new world, it also brought disease. Along with intriguing new plants and animals likely came illnesses such as smallpox and measles. The Spanish expeditions that came to the land now known as New Mexico put indigenous communities at great risk for a disease they had never experienced and to which they had no immunity. The results were disastrous for native people, leading to high rates of morbidity and mortality within their communities, and further weakening their defenses. As communities became infected, social structures and cultural fabric also weakened; as elders died, governance structures were undermined, and communities were made more vulnerable to exploitation of all kinds.
There is quite a list of infectious diseases that spread into the New World and infected those deemed “immunologically defenseless,” according to anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns. He also noticed that native people, prior to the arrival of the colonizers “suffered no smallpox, no measles, no chickenpox…” and lived in a relatively germ-free environment. The European-initiated exchange of germs and diseases wiped that out and is a consequence that is still with us.
In any setting, including New Mexico currently, the emerging and re-emerging of infections for which there are vaccines is an opportunistic one. When a significant portion of a population is vaccinated or has natural immunity due to a past infection, transmission rates decrease – in a sense protecting those who cannot be or are not vaccinated. When vaccination rates decline, however, the herd immunity declines and those susceptible within a population are at greater risk. In New Mexico, that exact phenomenon has happened as Lea County, as of March 7, 2025, had 30 cases and one fatality. Of these cases, 26 had not been vaccinated and four are being investigated as their vaccine status is not known.
[sources]
[1] Rhazès; Traité de la variole et de la rougeole
JB Ballière, Paris (1866)
[2] A. Hirsch; Handbook of geographical and historical pathology (trad. C. Creighton) vol 2, acute infective diseases (Chap. 5 measles, The New Sydenham Society, London (1883)
154-170
[3] L. Van Bogaert; Une leuco-encéphalite sclérosante subaigue
J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiat, 8 (3–4) (1945), pp. 101-120
[4] J.F. Anderson, J. Goldberger; Experimental measles in the monkey
Public Health Rep, 26 (24) (1911), pp. 847-848
[5] T.H. Tulchinsky, Maurice Hilleman; Creator of vaccines that changed the world
Case studies in public health, Academic Press, Cambridge (Mass) (2018), pp. 443-470
2018
Patrick Berche; History of measles, La Presse Médicale,
Volume 51, Issue 3, 2022, 104149, ISSN 0755-4982,
Dobyns, Henry F; Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America. (1983) Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press
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