Smallpox and stupidity

The Price of Ignorance: A Lesson from 1883

In a quiet Minnesota cemetery, there is a weathered, joint headstone for Ida Mathilde and Fritjof Bernard Dunham. They were my ancestors, and they died four days apart in 1883. For years, the inscription was a blur of degraded stone—a literal erasure of two lives.

I’ve always been intrigued about those young ancestors of mine. Recently I scoured cemeteries in Otter Tail County in Minnesota. I called several cemeteries especially ones designated for Norway.

Luckily, a very nice woman researched the graves for me. She also detailed the cause of their deaths.

The mystery is solved in a heartbreaking way. It was a death sentence called smallpox.

In 1883, my great-grandfather watched his siblings die because science hadn't caught up to the cruelty of the natural world. They didn’t have a choice. They didn't have a "personal philosophy" or a "suspicion of big medicine." They just had tiny coffins and a lifetime of grief.

Today, smallpox is gone. We didn't pray it away, and we didn't "boost our immune systems" with essential oils. We eradicated it with vaccinations.

The fact that we live in an era where people actually choose to invite these monsters back into our schools and homes is a special kind of arrogance. My ancestors buried their children because they had no defense.

Modern anti-vaxxers risk burying theirs because they’re too intellectually lazy to respect the history written on those headstones. There is no excuse for dead children in the 21st century—unless you’re just fucking stupid.

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