Once again, I’ve found myself researching a common childhood killer that, in our Western world, has had its fangs drawn by the twin powers of vaccination and antibiotics.

Diptheria, previously known as the Boulogne sore throat, malignant croup, was described by the Greeks 2500 years ago. In the year I’m writing about, 1825, it has just acquired the name by which we know it today, but effective prevention and treatment were still a century or more away. All my characters could do was keep their patient calm and hope that the ghastly false membrane growing from one tonsil to her uvula would not close the throat entirely, and that the child’s heart and kidneys did not become affected by the toxins the bacteria produces.

Sitting with my hero and heroine as they watched and worried, I once again gave thanks for the era and the country in which I raised my children.  Some forty years ago, one of my daughters had scarlet fever as a complication of mumps. When I told our doctor her temperature and that she was rambling in and out of consciousness, he put snow chains on his car and drove up the hill to give her an introvenous shot of antibiotic. Within half an hour, she was sitting up complaining that she wasn’t allowed to play with her brothers and sisters out in the snow. It’s an experience I have never forgotten.

We live in a time and a country of miracles. In Regency England slums, overcrowding and poor nutrition meant that diptheria, scarlet fever, influenza, mumps, small pox, and other epidemic illnesses spread easily and killed frequently, but a wealthy home was no protection. Children died in numbers that we, who expect to raise our children to adulthood, find it hard to comprehend. One third of children born in the early 1800s did not reach their fifth birthday.

On the whole,  I sanitise this world for my readers. My sick child survives, unharmed. I don’t make a habit of marching through my characters’ nurseries with a scythe. I am