What a mother's 1834 letter about measles tells us about MAHA

A historian discovers an 1834 letter from Jane Butt, a village mother who recorded 37 measles cases and credited their recovery to Morison’s purgative pills. The pills had no demonstrated benefit, and the journal publishing her account promoted them while attacking vaccination. Butt’s observations nevertheless had value: at a time when women were barred from medical training and losing authority as caregivers, she documented illness spreading through her community. Such grassroots counting helped build ways of understanding epidemics, even as her reasoning could not show whether the treatment worked. Most children recovered from measles regardless; unlike Butt’s claims, vaccination has been tested and shown to protect.

The letter offers a history for understanding today’s MAHA movement, whose appeal draws partly on women’s and parents’ grievances against medical institutions that have dismissed their concerns. The author argues that excluding ordinary people, especially women, from medical authority helped push them toward fringe remedies and platforms. But recognizing that exclusion does not mean treating every popular claim as sound: Butt lacked a comparison group, while modern vaccine refusal discounts strong evidence of protection. The piece calls for taking patients’ observations seriously while distinguishing them from reliable proof, and for acknowledging that public health has always depended on people outside professional medicine. Medical authority’s failure to listen can foster distrust; making room for ordinary voices need not mean abandoning scientific standards.