Jane Butt’s 1834 Letter Challenges MAHA’s Novelty — SkimNews
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- Jane Butt reported in her Sept. 23, 1834 letter that her own child had contracted measles and 36 other cases occurred in her community of Broughton; some patients developed severe lung inflammation, but all recovered.
- Morison’s pills were credited by Butt for the recoveries; she sometimes gave six pills at once to a toddler under 2 and also administered them to women and newborns. Most children who caught measles in 1834 survived with or without pills.
- Medical Dissenter printed Butt’s letter while its Strand office served as an official Morison’s pills depot in 1837; the radical journal offered a platform to a woman who could not train as physicians and mocked Edward Jenner’s cowpox vaccination as “vaccinic mania.”
- United States recorded more than 4,500 measles cases in 2026, the largest total since 1991; last school year, 4.2% of kindergartners were exempt from at least one required vaccine and measles-vaccine coverage fell to 92.4%, below the level needed to keep outbreaks from spreading.
- Pennsylvania has reported six measles-associated deaths during the current outbreak, while federal health officials dispute how many of them to count.
- MAHA draws on grievances over medical authority dismissing patients, especially women, and its medical populism makes longstanding ordinary participation appear novel and groundbreaking; Politico describes the movement as largely women who followed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into MAGA.
- Jim Downs says he preserved Butt’s story not to indict her or provide an antecedent to unfounded anti-vaccination arguments; he contrasts her counting with Pierre Louis’s comparison of differently treated patients and presents ordinary people as historical contributors to medicine.
Why it matters: For parents and public-health agencies, the current stakes are concrete: more than 4,500 U.S. cases in 2026 and 92.4% measles-vaccine coverage. Jane Butt’s letter adds a corrective to MAHA’s novelty framing: women’s outbreak counting belongs in public health’s history, but her ineffective purgatives show why popular testimony still requires tested comparison.
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