08/25/2026
Amazing work!
Almost everyone knows the name Jonas Salk, rightly celebrated for conquering polio. Almost no one knows the names Pearl Kendrick, Grace Eldering, and Loney Clinton Gordon -- three women who, working after hours in a cash-strapped Michigan laboratory during the Great Depression, defeated a disease that was killing more American children than polio, diphtheria, scarlet fever, or tuberculosis. That disease was whooping cough, and in the years before their vaccine, it was one of the most feared killers of young children.
To understand why, it helps to know what the disease did to a child. Whooping cough takes its name from the sound at the end of a coughing fit -- a desperate, crowing gasp for air drawn through a swollen throat -- but the name scarcely conveys the violence of it: attacks of coughing so relentless that a child cannot breathe between them, going red, then purple, then blue for want of air, sometimes for weeks on end, which is why it was also called the hundred-day cough. In the smallest babies, the ones it killed most often, there was frequently no whoop and no cough at all, only a sudden stopping of breath.
It struck about 100,000 American children a year and killed roughly 6,000 of them, the vast majority under the age of five -- more than diphtheria, more than scarlet fever, more than tuberculosis or polio -- and against it, medicine was very nearly helpless. "It's difficult to explain," the historian Carolyn Shapiro-Shapin has said of the era, "just how desperate people were for a vaccine at this time."
Into that desperation stepped two bacteriologists at the Michigan Department of Health's western branch in Grand Rapids. Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering spent their days on the state's routine business -- testing milk and water, the unglamorous work assigned to a regional lab -- and their nights on whooping cough, which they pursued on their own time, with almost no money, at the height of the Depression. For Eldering the fight was personal; she had survived the disease herself as a child.
They grew their cultures in mediums they boiled from scratch, from potatoes and seaweed, and to collect the bacteria they devised a better "cough plate" and drove out to sick children themselves, keeping a car ready day and night so that no case would be missed. It was painstaking, exhausting, and, by the standards of the day, faintly implausible -- two women in a broken-down lab, chasing a puzzle that had defeated the pharmaceutical industry.
What came of all this after-hours labor was the first whooping cough vaccine that actually worked. Field trials began in 1934, with Grand Rapids parents volunteering their children in droves, desperate for any protection; the vaccine proved itself, and by the end of the decade Michigan was producing it in quantity and sending it across the country.
By then a third scientist had joined the effort -- the most overlooked of the three. Loney Clinton Gordon had trained in home economics and hoped to become a dietitian, only to be told that White male chefs would not take orders from a Black woman; when Kendrick learned of her situation, in 1943, she hired her into the lab as a lab technician.
The vaccine was already saving lives by then, but it had not yet reached its full potential -- and it was Gordon who realized it. Testing thousands of cultures in search of the right conditions to grow the bacteria, she arrived at the formula, involving sheep's blood, that yielded a stronger vaccine than the team had yet produced -- an improvement later borne out when British trials judged their vaccine several times more potent than earlier versions. Michigan would eventually recognize her research as "a key component" of that success.
The effect of their work, taken together, was staggering. The death rate fell and kept falling, until a disease that had killed thousands of children a year became a rarity, and the terrible sound that had once been familiar in American homes began, as one history puts it, to fade "from cultural memory." Kendrick and Eldering went on to fold their vaccine into the combined shot for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis that children still receive today; by some estimates, it now saves on the order of half a million lives a year around the world.
Nearly a century later, that achievement is quietly being undone. This week, the CDC reported that the share of American kindergartners with vaccine exemptions -- overwhelmingly for personal or "philosophical" reasons rather than medical need -- has climbed to an all-time high, the fourth record year in a row, even as coverage for the DTaP shot slipped to its lowest level in years. This erosion has not been driven by any failure of the vaccines, which remain as effective as ever, but by fear and misinformation.
Much of it traces to a single, thoroughly debunked claim linking vaccines to autism, and to the man who has spent some two decades as its most prominent promoter, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. -- now the nation's health secretary. Under Kennedy, the administration has spent more than a year systematically undermining the country's vaccine infrastructure -- purging the independent experts who set immunization guidance and replacing them with skeptics, and rewriting the childhood schedule around discredited theories -- all over the unified objection of the nation's pediatricians.
The official machinery of American public health has become a source of exactly the "chaos and confusion," in the words of Dr. James Campbell of the American Academy of Pediatrics, that leads some parents to opt out, leaving their children at risk.
The cost of that confusion will not be borne by the officials who sow it. It will be borne by the children -- above all the infants too young to be vaccinated, who depend on everyone around them being protected -- as diseases that were beaten within living memory return to fill the gap.
The historians of whooping cough note that once its familiar whoop had faded, it did not stay gone. When an earlier wave of vaccine fear took hold, and vaccination faltered, 'unvaccinated children began to turn up blue and breathless in hospital wards' once more -- a warning of what falls away when a hard-won protection is allowed to lapse.
Pearl Kendrick died in 1980, and the tribute written for her put the matter better than any statistic could. "A life saved by prevention cannot even be identified," it read. "Who are the men and women living today who would be dead from whooping cough had it not been for Pearl Kendrick's vaccine?"
They walk among us by the millions, unknowing -- the quiet legacy of three women who beat a plague, and a reminder of what we stand to lose if we let ourselves forget how they did it.
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To introduce today's kids to what used to be another common childhood disease prior to vaccinations, polio, we highly recommend the books "Blue" (https://www.amightygirl.com/blue) and "Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio" (https://www.amightygirl.com/small-steps), both for ages 9 and up
For a powerful biography for adult readers about Judith Heumann, the famous disability rights leader who became paralyzed by polio as a toddler, we highly recommend at https://www.amightygirl.com/being-heumann -- her memoir is also available in a Young Readers Edition for ages 10 to 15 at https://www.amightygirl.com/rolling-warrior
To introduce children to pioneering women of public health who believed in science, we highly recommend "Dr. Jo: How Sara Josephine Baker Saved the Lives of America's Children" for ages 5 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/dr-jo) and “The Doctor with an Eye for Eyes: The Story of Dr. Patricia Bath” for ages 5 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/the-doctor-with-an-eye-for-eyes)
For more children's books about pioneering women of science, visit our blog post, "60 Children's Books to Inspire Science-Loving Mighty Girls," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=13914
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