“He died with the Effects of the Measles”

Henry Marchant (1741–1796, shown here) was a rising young lawyer in Rhode Island.

Born on Martha’s Vineyard, Marchant grew up in Newport and attended the College of Philadelphia (one of the schools that became the University of Pennsylvania in 1791).

In 1771 Marchant was appointed to be Rhode Island’s attorney general. He set sail for London to observe judicial practices there. His notes on James Somerset’s freedom case are an important document of that episode.

Marchant headed home in November 1772. On arriving in Boston, he received a boatload of bad news, as he told Benjamin Franklin in a letter. One loss was particularly close:

Mr. [Tuthill] Hubbart next informed me of the Death of my Third and only Son a Child of Three years old. He died with the Effects of the Measles, the Day after I left London. My two Daughters had been very ill with the same Disorder but are since happily recovered.

Measles was a common disease in colonial America. Martha Washington and other people at Mount Vernon caught it in 1760, and some of her enslaved workers in 1773. Benjamin Franklin’s grandson Benny caught measles in 1772, like little William Marchant. In 1788 Henry Knox reported that he had five children going through the disease.

In 1783 Abigail Adams reported that her son Charles had came down with the measles, adding: “it has proved very mortal in Boston. Tis said 300 children have been buried since last March.” Abigail’s sister Mary Cranch included a cousin’s descriptions of his symptoms in a letter in 1790:

I know you Will rejoice to hear that cousin Tom has got comfortable through the Measles. He caught them at Cambridge the day he arriv’d from new york— He came here the Monday after & told me he thought he had them but return’d the next day—promising to return as soon as he felt the Symtoms The Monday following his cousin William brought him home in a close carriage but he did not break out till Wednesday.

he was pretty sick but not very bad till they came out. He had Several faint turns before & sometimes felt as if he did not weigh a pound after they broke out— The rash came first but the measles soon follow’d thick enough, his cough was troublesome & his Fever pretty high but upon the whole I think he has had them light to what people in general have or to what you & I had. There are many People Who have them now extreamly bad & many have died with them—

Measles was overshadowed by smallpox, another disease that produced fever and spots, because smallpox was much deadlier. On the other hand, measles is much more contagious—spreading far more quickly and easily than Covid-19, H.I.V., and other viruses we’ve faced in recent decades.

We don’t have to worry about measles as much as past generations did because in 1954 medical scientists developed a vaccine. Cases in the U.S. of A. dropped precipitously after the government approved regular immunizations in 1963.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert Kennedy, Jr., has cockamamie ideas about vaccines. In fact, Kennedy was chosen for his cockamamie ideas—he has no other connection to health services. In particular, experts blame Kennedy for promoting a measles epidemic in American Samoa in 2019.

During his confirmation hearings Kennedy made noises about believing in vaccines, pointing out that all his children have been immunized. But as soon as he was in office and a media outlet gives him free rein to talk, Kennedy returned to spouting all sorts of lies about the nature of the vaccine, its effectiveness, and its side effects.

This past month, Kennedy demanded that the Centers for Disease Control adapt to his anti-vaccine beliefs, cancel highly promising research, and curtail the availability of Covid-19 boosters for Americans. When the head of the C.D.C. refused to go along, Kennedy and Trump forced her out, prompting the next level of managers to resign in protest.

There are many ways the Trump administration is harming people and causing deaths around the globe. The effects of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine crusade, if not stopped, will be among the most damaging. Parents will once again be feeling the same grief as Henry Marchant for no good reason.