ABSTRACT
In this chapter we discuss a class of diseases which
were major killers in the industrializing world of the
nineteenth century but which, during the twentieth
century, gradually faded away as global causes of
death. It is convenient to group them together here
as ‘children’s diseases’. We should emphasize that
this name does not reflect so much an innate attrac-
tion of the diseases to that age group. Rather, they
were originally so widespread that few adults had not
met them in their childhood, and they had often
gained (it varies from disease to disease) some
measure of protection. Each generation of children
represented a new crop of susceptibles ready to be
fed into the arms of the ‘angel of death’ (Figure 5.1).
