Raised Without Modern Medicine

Abigail W.

I grew up in a Christian Scientist household. There was no medicine, no doctors, nothing. If there had been a really serious emergency, my parents would have taken us to the ER. But I was provided no childhood vaccines, and I never went to the doctor until I was 18.

The funny thing about Christian Scientists is that they were big into other sciences. They did not reject anything but medicine.

I grew up learning chemistry and biology. My parents grew up in the 50s and 60s when the space race was going on, and that science was impressive to them. But my grandmother (who imparted her beliefs on my mom) suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and refused all medical treatment until life became unbearable with the damage to her joints.

Five years after I was born, in 1979, there was a major measles outbreak (linked to low vaccine uptake), and I contracted it then. I don’t remember much about actually having it, though when I got older, I realized it wasn’t without consequence.

When I turned 18, I became a rebel. I was an adult and wanted to rebel against my parents. I got my first job and that gave me health insurance. I thought, well, I’ve never seen a doctor, so I want to make sure I’m healthy. So I went – and I didn’t understand what the big deal was. Why did my parents think it was so bad? I’m never not going to the doctor again.

Eventually, my dad came around too. About 20 years ago, my mom died. She died because her personal beliefs made her refuse medical care. We don’t even know exactly what she died from because she refused to do anything about it. The death certificate said likely heart disease, and I think maybe she had untreated diabetes as well. If those were the things she died from, they were either easily preventable or easily controlled with medicine. My dad watched his wife die over several years and decided he couldn’t handle the whole Christian Science thing anymore.

I’m not sure why these kinds of beliefs are so strong. At times I asked my mom, “Don’t you think that God gave us humans the knowledge to be able to find this stuff out, to realize what disease is, and to come up with vaccines?” In fact, tracing back our family tree, we are direct descendants of Cotton Mather. 

Mather was a Puritan minister in the American colonies. He was one of the people who helped with smallpox vaccination, and actually conducted one of the first clinical trials in a sense. Back then, you had to take a smallpox pustule from someone infected and expose someone else to it. It was a method he learned from one of his slaves, and it saved many lives in New England. 

My mom told me about our connection and showed me family records that went back centuries. I find it ironic that I grew up in a household where there were no vaccines, no medicine when I’m a descendant of the Christian clergymen who tried to get it done in this country.

My parents were vaccinated for smallpox, and it has pretty much been eradicated because of vaccines. If that’s not proof, I don’t know what is.

Now for measles, I think my dad pretty much kicks himself now for not having had me vaccinated. I have rheumatoid arthritis, what’s called factor-negative RA. I was predestined to have this condition genetically, but my doctors believe that having had measles screwed up my autoimmune status further. 

When I was in my 20s, I started having joint pain, and it just got progressively worse until I was finally diagnosed in my 30s. When I walk into my Rheumatologist’s office, she says, “Oh, there’s my problem patient,” because they don’t really know why my case is so bad. When I went and put down my health history and said that I had measles, you could literally see the light bulb go up over her head. It’s definitely just a theory, but she’s asked her colleagues, and they seem to agree.

My fear now is that we’re going to have a lot of moms not vaccinating their children against measles. I cannot hold immunity to the measles since I’m on immunosuppressants, so if there is an outbreak and I come in contact with someone who has the virus and isn’t aware of it, there is the potential that I could contract it. With my immunocompromised self, that could be deadly. 

I understand the fear of medicine, having been raised that way, but educating myself really, really put me at ease. Science is amazing, and vaccines have been around for hundreds of years (to Cotton Mather) and even longer than that.

Just research. Look and see what came before and how vaccines have positively affected society. Smallpox has been eradicated, and we had eliminated measles, too. Unfortunately, with this new thinking, it’s coming back.

Abigail W. is a 50 year old “mom” of birds and a student at the local community college, unwilling to allow the chronic illnesses that she deals with derail her goal of getting a history degree. Her story, like all others on this blog, was a voluntary submission. If you want to help make a difference, submit your own post by emailing us through our contact form. We depend on real people like you sharing experience to protect others from misinformation.