There are a lot of things that are interesting about reading unabridged #ChaletSchool books, the first of which is 98 years old this year. The last is 53 years old.
Some are High Critical Yikes: huge amounts of smoking, racist language of the period casually tossed around.
But there’s also some really interesting insights in to the past.
I just learned about a product called “Thermogene” which my e-reader dictionary didn’t recognise as a word, which is understandable because it seems it was a product for a wadding /wrap one could cover in medicated rubs.
https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30025791
It must have been very common to be used casually in a paragraph as if everyone in the 1920s would recognise it and what it was.
Opened box of Thermogene Medicated Wadding containing some pink-coloured wadding wrapped in paper. The box is predominantly red with 'Thermogene' in large letters across front and back in an elipse with other inscriptions relating to manufacturer, export and use.
Again, these were written contemporaneously with the war, sometimes to the clear detriment of the story. Want to know how unforeseen the invasion of the Channel Islands was? Exile (1940, presumably sent to press or published before April that year) had the #ChaletSchool relocate from Austria to Guernsey bc of Anschluss.
Goes To It (1941) had to start the book by relocating from Guernsey during the fall of France to “Armishire” (Herefordshire).
Anyway, the point is this: it is a series that spans about 50 years, from well before vaccines existed for common “childhood” illnesses to just around the time that they were becoming common.
In that time maybe 1/3-1/2 of the roughly 58 books covered how epidemic diseases fucked with the life of this boarding school (usually only one or two chapters, but that’s still a serious number of words).
I don’t know if people that are maybe younger gen xers to zoomers understand fully how common epidemic disease was before vaccines and how it could devastate learning and life.
And I’m not even just talking about flu. Measles, mumps, rubella, scarlet fever & their after effects.
TB (often shown in books due to a symbiotic relationship between the #ChaletSchool and a tb sanitarium - some children even lost parents to it in the series) & polio (not shown “on screen” but recovering people were)
So anyway, between the clear “these diseases are no joke and fuck shit up on a regular basis” message in these books that I love and my interest in medical history it’s a complete mystery why anyone would be anti vax or see so called childhood diseases as nbd, let alone in such numbers as could lead to a huge measles outbreak.
London measles warning: Outbreak could hit tens of thousands https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-66200444
Lizzie
