In 2012 when most children get vaccines routinely in infancy, with boosters in childhood, many of the common childhood illnesses of frontier culture are quite rare.  That does not mean kids nowadays don’t get sick. They do. But what they get are most often sore throats, tummy aches, flus and head colds.  They get scratches, and cuts as they play and nearly all elementary school classrooms have bandages in the teacher’s desk. Kids like bandages and request them for minor not even visible cuts, hangnails, scratches even. Most teachers comply.

A study recently of seniors’ care in Alberta found that at the very intense 24 hour care level, seniors often see a doctor in their nursing homes but rarely have to go to emergency. People in the assisted living centres on the other hand, where there is little medical care available, maybe one nurse, are whisked away to emergency often. It seems that staff, when in doubt calls for experts, just to be on the safe side.

It seems like the schools are going the same way and maybe that’s OK. If a child has a sore foot, teachers let the child get an icepack at the office and sit out the phys ed class. If the child feels sick, teachers call home. Teachers are not legally permitted or medically trained to diagnose illness at all and can’t even administer medicine the child brings in most cases.   There are many worries about liabilities.

There are some very big concerns out there about medical care too.  A lot of children are being diagnosed with ailments earlier cultures had no name for, or if they had a name, they did not often have a treatment.  Just this week I had the pleasure of teaching a grade 10 boy who had just returned from a charity trip to Mexico for a week to help build a house for people in poverty. He has done an amazing thing and I said so. He explained that he does it through his group, Kids Cancer Care and when I asked if someone in his family has cancer he said,  “Yes, I do”.

I have taught a few very seriously ill kids and their memory stays in my mind for decades.  One little grade 8 girl had leukemia and she came to school when she felt up to it, had a few very close friends, but did die, in grade 9.  Two of my students, a brother and sister, had cystic fibrosis. They were so gentle and wise for their years, him in grade 8 playful and funny, her in grade 9 tall and lovely, about to enter the dating scene I suppose. But during one class discussion one of them revealed that every night each of them slept in oxygen tents and struggled to breathe.  I read up on the illness and found out later that the life expectancy at the time was only into the twenties.  The heart breaks for what they had to deal with and I am touched by their maturity.

I had a grade 7 student with hydrocephaly, a very large head,  normal IQ but tunnel vision. His classmates had known him since elementary and it was touching to see how they so gently accommodated him.  I see that a lot. It’s not even that you have to tell kids to be nice to each other. It seems that either someone did that a lot before or they just do it but often I see great thoughtfulness, child to child.  A child who is unusually short is called up to write on the whiteboard and someone rushes to get him a little plastic step to stand on. No one asked her to do that.  A grade 10 class is practising the etiquette of formal introductions and shaking hands and the kids enthusiastically shake the stump hand of the student who only has one finger nub.  I see inclusion’s benefits many times socially.

I also have seen a small boy who could barely walk, struggle to drag his legs along the ground to keep up with the kids running down the hall to gym class. He had a walker, he wanted to keep up, we tried to figure out ways he could be ref and umpire but in the end his family pulled him from the regular program so he could be in a wheelchair setting where he was more comfortable.  There are schools integrating the deaf and hard of hearing and schools where they are in special classes. I have taught using a special microphone even to amplify my voice to the receiver one boy had, and, embarrassingly, one day forgot to turn it off as I went to the  staff washroom.

I taught a nearly blind girl and typed up braille sheets for her in grade 7 but I felt that not everything we did in class was captured that way.   I admired how she tried but in some ways wished she had been in a room more geared to all her needs so she could get not just a token amount of what we were doing but a course designed for her.

I admire the student who had no legs but two prosthetic devices from the knee down who nonetheless wore shorts to class. I admire the boy in grade 11 who when we were doing Shakespeare study took off his prosthetic leg and hopped around playfully waving our plastic sword.  I love it when kids feel comfortable at school and among friends.  I notice sometimes that at the start of a year a child will be very shy about something and only after a few months will make it less of a thing to hide that she is missing a finger. Kids sense acceptance and it’s not about what you tell them you think so much as how you in fact treat them, as normal.

But I have  no medical training and don’t feel comfortable unless a very competent gym instructor is in the room if students are doing certain gym moves.  We are a culture very aware of health. Kids are not allowed to share lunches, so as to not cross-contaminate. They are not to drink out of each other’s water bottles and the phenomenon of water bottles itself is quite new, given that Calgary’s drinking fountains for free still offer some of the cleanest water in North America. Small kids are often asked to bring hand sanitizer along with their school supplies in September and most classrooms and some hallways have hand sanitizers along the walls.

 Most kids get minor illnesses and scrapes, even a few broken bones as they grow up.  A few get very ill or seriously injured. A family killed in a car crash, a child who fell through the ice and drowned even just this week. A child who smothered in a snow fort, a playground dedicated to a student who died of cancer, a rock garden with a child’s name on it.  Other schools have plaques for a teen who drowned, for  kids who are always to be remembered while the rest move on.  Yearbooks mention them, scholarships are sometimes named after them.  But I guess the good side is that there really are quite few of them.   

We have a healthy and lucky generation nowadays for being born in these times where medical care is accessible and free.  It was not always so.

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In the 1880s kids lived in a harsher reality. They saw animals being born and some dying. The cemetery was near where they lived, because everything else was too, and they likely knew a few people buried there. In Calgary the meat packing plant and slaughter house were not far from town.

The fairytales kids were raised with, the nursery rhymes reminded them that sickness was part of life. Solomon Grundy was born, married, died. Kids recited “I do not like you Dr. Fell” and “Miss Polly had a dolly who was sick sick sick”.  They were exposed in the 1880s to a lot of risks we don’t take now, sharp knives and steep cliffs, open fires, gas fires, wild animals nearby and creeks that flooded. They were far from a doctor.  Their world was not as carefully labelled for poisonous plants though right in Alberta we have some. Broken bones that nowadays might be repaired by screws and plates would in early times have required amputation.  Earaches that nowadays would be treated by antibiotics would be waited out and a few would result in deafness.    If a cut got infected the risk was of gangrene setting in, amputation or even death.

The problem was not just that the doctor was far away either. The doctor may use techniques that we nowadays use less.   Blood letting to cure illness was going out of favor but some still used it in 1900. There were no bandaids and wounds had to be kept clean with cloths before 1920.   Doctors did as well as they could but they worked without many things we have today.  The other problem for settlers was that doctors cost money.   Some doctors in 1910 would make a house call but charged $1 per mile they had to come. If a visit would cost the family $30, some families just couldn’t afford to even ask the doctor to come.

Sanitation was not as intense as today and kids were exposed to more bed bugs, water that was not fully clean, milk that was not pasteurized.   Exposed to hay and animals, few kids became allergic, consistent with what we call the hygiene hypothesis, nowadays, but many kids still did get sick.

Because of poverty kids often had clothes that could not withstand the severe cold, and shoes or boots that did not fit or protect adequately from cuts on rough land.  The school ground, like the home, had houseflies and sand flies, mosquitoes, bees and wasps and not all schools had screens on the windows. Teachers improvised with smudge pots creating smoke.

Kids also, when ill, mixed with each other, unknowingly spreading illness. When they all drank out of the same well, or from the same scoop at school, they were exposed to each other’s germs and did not know it.  The time when a person should be incubated from others for flu is 1-4 days, for measles 9-12 days, for rubella 14-23 days. Since frontier people did not know that, those illnesses when they hit, hit a lot of people, often even the teacher.

Frontier people had their folk cures, things that seemed to work. Sometimes they likely worked because as time passed, the illness healed anyway and the medicine was a coincidence. Others may have had some good properties themselves.  Parents knew a lot of folk treatments and cookbooks of the 1890s even listed home remedies.  The Eaton’s catalogue of 1910 sold medical supplies including glycerine, vaseline, Listerine, and believe it or not morphine, spirit of ether . Some catalogues at the time sold medicinal Belladonna along with the absorbent cotton.  Belladonna, used for some digestive complaints has  ingredients in it which can in high doses be fatal. 

There were a lot of rumors about what would work when a child got sick and mixed with logic was myth.  There were sayings about health, including that if you break a mirror you will have seven years of bad luck, if you swallow gum it will be stuck in you for seven years, if you make a funny face into the wind your face will get stuck that way, if you step on a crack you’ll break your mother’s back. The sayings were playful, likely just warnings for good behavior, but kids remembered them.

There were other more serious beliefs too about medical care in the 1900s.

Here are a few, mixing both the ones likely to work and the ones that surprise. The list is not intended of course, as medical advice.

For earache, a person might blow smoke into the ear.  For fever a child may be given boiled tea made of willow bark, or of elderberry blossom.  For a cough it was common to give chicken soup, or wild cherry, garlic in milk,  sugar syrup mixed with a drop of coal oil, or a mixture of lemon with a drop of whiskey. Sometimes to reduce chest congestion parents would apply a cloth bag onto the chest filled with coal oil and lard, or mustard and flour paste.  Some of these made strong smells that could be dangerous.  Some parents thought it helped to rub Vicks VapoRub on the feet.

For sore throats mothers might give onion syrup boiled with sugar,  or lemon juice mixed with honey. Doctors now realize that some of the things being used had antibiotic properties so when they worked there was some science to it.

If a person had a headache, tea from a willow branch was recommended and doctors now find that this does have salycilic acid in it which has some properties like aspirin. For cuts parents might rub Aloe Vera leaves onto the wound, or apply castor oil.

For insect stings parents might apply a mix of mud and chewing tobacco and for wounds a rub of violet leaves.  For toothaches some found put vinegar on the tooth and some had the child gargle salt water. Some wiped the tooth with the brown bits of burned paper.

For a black eye a parent might apply a piece of meat to draw out the blood or a poultice containing bread.  For a burn the parent might use bicarbonate of soda or some parents applied cold tea leaves. They might wrap chewed hazel bark around a injured finger.  For a plugged nose some parents had the patient gargle hot water with soot in it.

In 1895 a lot of the treatments used alcohol and before 1905 medicines with patented names did not have to list their ingredients. Some of them were 44% alcohol. In fact a medicine advertised in 1906 as a soothing syrup for babies had in it laudanum which was often 10% opium.  Several medicines available from catalogues or merchants had in them opium or cocaine.

In 1900 in fact brandy and other alcohols were believed to be a cure for many ailments.

It was a time when sunshine and fresh air and natural light were considered good for a person. In 1912 the rules for building schools in some provinces even required lots of air space, an 11 foot ceiling and 15 square feet of floor space per child. In 1930  some Alberta school designs required 100 square feet of glass, therefore large windows, in every classroom. The windows were to be ten inches from the ceiling and 3 feet up from the floor.

In 1920 the life expectancy of a man was about 59, a woman 61,  while in 2012 those numbers are in Alberta about 78 and 83. The life expectancy does not tell the whole story though because those are numbers of those who lived to adulthood. Death of young children was much more common then. Most families knew of someone with at least one tragedy, a baby that died just from failing to thrive, a child scalded to death when playing near a hot stove. In 1911 the infant mortality rate in Calgary was about 100 babies for every 1000 born. Half of those died within a month of birth, especially if they were born in a cold winter.  Even today in 2012 it is common for 10% of children in the third world to die before age 5 but in Calgary nearly all live.

The risks of childhood illness were extreme.  German measles could lead to deafness, blindness, heart disease.   Tonsilitis could lead to abscess.  Measles could lead to brain swelling, severe diarrhea, dehydration, ear infections, pneumonia and around the world still in 2012, there are over 150,000 deaths per year from measles. Mumps though rarely fatal, can lead to sterility, meningitis and pancreatitis.  Whooping cough was fatal to one of every two hundred infants under age one and those who survived still risked complications like pneumonia and seizures.  Scarlet fever could lead to kidney, liver disease or bone damage.

When a way to prevent these diseases was discovered, a clever route by vaccination, the outlook for children changed tremendously.  Because of vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella and later for whooping cough rates of infection have gone down by over 95%.

Until then, when one child got ill, it was scary for many.  Until antibiotics were created, pneumonia had a mortality rate of 50% in infants.

So how did early pioneers deal with outbreaks of contagious disease?

In 1837 there had been a smallpox epidemic in the area, and another came in 1870 and yet another in 1900. Cholera was around in 1890 and 50% of natives in Alberta died, including two thirds of the Blackfoot confederacy.  In 1893 South Ward school closed for a few weeks due to a diphtheria outbreak. It was only in 1864 that Pasteur had even figured out how to sterilize milk and only recently  in 1880 that Lister had even discovered there are germs.  In 1910 in Calgary when a child got typhoid, the whole family was at risk and the community discovered dangers of drinking unpasteurized milk and not boiling it.

In 1896 there was a vaccine for typhoid and school officials wanted students to have access to it. When no vaccine was known and an epidemic came officials often closed the school.  Even  in 1918 with the flu epidemic at first kids  came to class wearing wore cheesecloth masks soaked in eucalyptus or a square of cloth tied around their neck and hanging close to their chests and drenched in camphor. Later the schools closed completely.  For war injuries, in 1918 Stanley Jones and Victoria schools were turned into temporary hospitals and one room was even made a morgue. Most schools were closed Nov 15 1918 to Jan 15 1919 because of the flu.

In 1920 families were quarantined if anyone there had scarlet fever and a sign as put on the door.

The schools mobilized several ways to protect kids’  health. In 1900 the first rule was that if your child was sick the child was not to be sent to school. The problem was that if the child showed signs of sickness at school, it wasn’t easy to suddenly get the parents to take them home and they often had to stay the rest of the day anyway.

 By 1902 schools were regulated for proper ventilation and lighting of the building. In 1912 there were regular health inspections done of all school children, testing their hearing, vision and examining their teeth.

In 1912 the school board in Calgary started a school inspection program where one of two doctors went to each school twice a year to examine sanitary conditions.  They examined 2256 children and found that 856 had bad teeth, 479 had not been vaccinated, 177 had bad vision and 38 had ear disease.  By 1915 free medical and dental care was provided to children under age 15 at Hillhurst and other schools.

When a poliomyelitis epidemic struck in 1920 in Calgary, some parents feared overcrowding in the schools was to blame. The virus is spread through contact, phlegm or body fluids and the fever, vomiting, sore throat and muscle stiffness in some cases led to permanent paralysis. Even as late as 1952 there were 144 cases of infantile paralysis in Calgary.

Dr. Geraldine Oakley set up school inspections in 1920 to send 8 nurses around looking at children at school and then to visit sick children at home  Children would pass in a line in front of the nurse in single file to show hands, teeth , throat, ears and hair. The nurses were able to make 599 referrals to get eyeglasses, 428 to get tonsils or adenoid surgery, and the dental clinic did 5823 fillings and pulled 4988 teeth.  Dr. Catherine Nichols Gunn did 75-100 home visits a month and walked most of the route, often 5-10 miles a day.

When vaccines were developed the schools were quick to try to ensure all students were able to get them. Even in 1901 the Northwest Territories was trying to vaccinate some pupils. When other vaccines became available, many schools endorsed them.  When insulin was discovered in 1923 many lives were saved, including lives of children.

Kids with intense needs were a mystery at first for how to help them. In 1915 Calgary set up some special classes though at the time the label used was one not permitted today. The children were called ‘subnormal’.  In 1919 a cottage school had a special class for 11 children and in 1927, 82 with special needs were enrolled there.  In 1953 an Alberta wide school for the deaf was opened in Edmonton.

In 1916 a typical home medicine chest might contain iodine, castor oil, castoria, salve, liniment and camphorated oil.  There were still no drugs to  fight pain and there was no anesthetic for surgery.

When in the 1920s the role of vitamins was understood, health improved. Vitamin D in cod liver oil helped kids avoid skeletal problems and rickets.   It was a time of progress and yet without full understanding of everything. That may make it a bit like today really. In 1920 coal trucks delivered coal to rural schools and on days they did, so much coal dust was blowing around the playground that many schools did not let the kids out for recess.

Problems were noticed but solutions were not always known. In 1931 Calgary set up a ‘sight saving’ class for children with vision problems. They all got thicker pencils, large print books and wide ruled paper.

By 1935 the city had set up a free dentist for school kids, who helped them at a city hall clinic. In 1935 schools in Calgary closed in September due to an outbreak of infantile paralysis, polio.  By 1936 immunization shots were the  norm and even the teacher got them when the opportunity came.

Yet patent medicines still offered what were claimed to be miracle cures.  Carter’s little liver pills and Dodd’s kidney pills were popular in the 1930s. Cod liver oil was  believed to be good for ‘what ails you’, in a general way, even as a preventative.  In the 1930s a child who got a cut might get treated with bright red mercurchrome, a fluid to clean the wound and also proclaim bravely the injury. It stung a little since it had an alcohol base and stained the skin but it did have antiseptic qualities. It was eventually discontinued mostly because it also contained mercury which can be poisonous.

In 1940 when penicillin became widely available the outlook for other infections was much more optimistic. Before antibiotics,  meningitis had been 100% fatal. In 1944 streptomycin was being used to fight tuberculosis, the other dreaded illness, known also as consumption. TB scared people. A single sneeze released 40,000 droplets many containing the bacteria, and an infected person, untreated, could infect 10-15 people a year. In Calgary from 1920 the disease was considered so contagious that those with it were taken right out of the community to the Baker Sanatorium, on the River across from Bowness Park. Many ended their days there.  The new treatment changed that. In the 1950s when the Salk vaccine was available for polio, kids lined up at the school to get it.

The vaccines for measles of 1963, for mumps of 1967 and for German measles of 1969 helped reduce student absence  as well as death. Measles alone had claimed 50-75 lives a year before the vaccine arrived.

When in  1980 there was a vaccine for diphtheria and in 1995 one for chicken pox, parents may have become complacent about risks kids of earlier times had.  A movement spread against vaccines and in 2012 a measles outbreak in Edmonton is raising concerns for those who  have not been vaccinated.

Kids however, despite medical advances are still kids.  Teachers in frontier times tried to provide emergency medical aid on site because accidents happen.  In 1925 one rural teacher noticed the child had a skin rash, impetigo and she later got it herself.  Both needed ointment and she also had to scrub down the outdoor toilets to prevent future infection.  When kids ran around the playground they sometimes fell and in rural areas, with rough rocks and cactus around, a fall might make a deep cut. The teacher often had to wrap cloths around to stop the bleeding.

It was not uncommon for a teacher to notice that some of the littlest kids were not quite toilet trained and emitted odors. A few were not even weaned from the bottle, oddly at age 5. In 1930 one teacher found the parent had included in the child’s pack a bottle with a large nipple on it. In 1933 a child at school appeared to have whooping cough and the teacher had to administer Ipecac to make the child throw up.  A teacher in 1933 found the student had ringworm and she bandaged patches over the infected areas.  In 1936 when funds were low at home, some parents simply felt that measles, mumps and chicken pox would heal naturally and did not even seek medical care.

Early times had outbreaks of head lice too and in 1935 when a teacher felt it necessary to check all hair with a fine tooth comb and coal oil, one of the parents said she would shoot the teacher if she touched her daughter’s hair.

In 1935 when one child knocked out his tooth in the rural playground, the teacher walked home with him to explain to the parents. There were no telephones.

Some kids in 1937 appeared at school with only gunny sacks on their feet, not even shoes.  In 1940 one little girl at a rural school arrived crying. The dad was at war and the mother apparently had died in the night. The teacher had to walk back to the house with the girl, lay out the body and contact the undertaker.

Accidents at school happened too. At one school a girl in 1940 fell through the outside cellar door and broke her collarbone.  A horse got its leg caught on a wire fence and the teacher was enlisted to apply a tourniquet.  A child at a Christmas concert in 1944 fainted and was caught by an adult just before she fell off the stage. In 1944 a child fell on the baseball diamond of the school, broke his knee and his tooth went through his lip.

Parental opinion about schools treating illness varied.  It still does today.  Some were grateful for the help while others even in 1930 were offended at what they viewed as an intrusion.

It was not until 1950 that desks were designed specifically for kids who were left-handed and the trend to force them to change ended.  In 1951 women’s institutes provided schools with first aid kits. Recognition of some rights had changed and there was more interest in illness prevention.  What was slower to change was the unequal treatment of boys and girls.