Shown here are Doctors Pear Kendrick and Grace Eldering, and together they developed the first successful vaccine against the childhood disease pertussis, or Whooping Cough.
Whooping Cough is of course characterized by the sound of the hollow, forced, and unremitting chest cough that mostly younger people endured until the 20th-century development of a vaccine: it killed more children in the 1920s than did scarlet fever, measles, diphtheria, and tuberculosis.
Treatments developed before Ph.Ds. Kendrick and Eldering came on the scene had proven ineffective. But these two scientists worked with public health officials in the state of Michigan to develop a general vaccine for the disease. Whereas some vaccines had been developed for individual use from a specific patient (called autogenous), Kendrick and Eldering used local strains of the pertussis bacilli, then inactivated the cultures with a sterilizer called Merthiolate.
Notably, the two ran their vaccine through safety tests which included self-injecting it into their own arms. By 1933, the vaccine had been developed. It ran in widespread trials until its final approval in 1940. The vaccine against pertussis was developed further with contributions from an African-American chemist named Loney Gordon, who figured out using sheep’s blood that the most effective strain of the bacteria could be cultured in petri dishes.
Source(s): _Michigan Historical Review_, “A whole community working together”: Pear Kendrick, Grace Eldering, and the Grand Rapids Pertussis Trials, 1932-1939,” Carolyn G. Shapiro- Shapin, Spring 2007, vol 33, no. 1 , pp. 59-85, published by Central Michigan University. History.com/news/whooping-cough-vaccine-pertussis-great-depression, April 23, 2019, Natalie Zarrelli, “Whooping cough killed 6,000 kids a year before these ex-teachers created a vaccine.
