We were smart enough to eradicate measles, but arrogant enough to invite it back. Welcome to a four-part series on the precise ways we’re fucking up 50 years of medical progress.

By Leigh Cowart

The great Persian physician Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī, often described grandfather of pediatric medicine, was a meticulous man. Before the age of 30, he discovered ethanol thanks to the careful application of the then-new art of distillation. When overseeing the building of a new hospital in Baghdad, al-Rāzī hung raw meat around the city and broke ground where the meat putrefied most slowly. And, in one of the 200 or so books that he wrote, he created the first and most extraordinarily detailed account of one of the most infectious diseases ever known to man.

Since al-Rāzī first carefully documented it, this little strand of RNA tucked in a protein envelope has enjoyed a rare kind of notoriety, even in the shock-and-awe world of infectious diseases. In 1529, the Spanish introduced it to Cuba, killing two out of three natives. Over the next decade or so, the virus ravaged Central America, decimating many populations and killing up to half of all Hondurans. And in 1693 in colonial America, Virginia governor Edmund Andros issued a proclamation for a “day of Humiliation and Prayer” in the hope of…