Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

Measles. It starts with a high fever, a sore throat, and eventually a nasty rash appears.

The infection can progress quickly and lead to deadly complications, pneumonia, brain swelling.

In the 1950s, nearly every child in the United States caught the measles before the age of 15.

One of them was an 11-year-old boy who was attending boarding school outside of Boston.

His name was David Edmonston.

His story, the suffering he endured along with millions of others, represents a key moment in the

history of measles. The vaccine is named after him. Back in the mid-1900s, an average of 400 people died for measles

each year, and another three to four million suffered from the infection. Doctors were determined to

find a way to prevent the nasty illness. David Edmondston spoke not long ago to Washington Post reporter Gileon Brachell,

and he recalled that as he lay sick in bed at his school in Boston, that he was asked

a strange question by his doctor. Would he be willing to be a service to mankind? The doctor asked whether he could take a blood sample

and throat swap. Edmondston, along with a handful of other infected boys at the school, agreed.

The doctors were part of a team working to develop a measles vaccine. The process is described

in an educational video about measles

released by the pharmaceutical company Merck in 1964. Blood samples taken by Dr. Thomas Peebles

from children with natural measles were injected into cultures of human kidney cells and incubated.

And a year later, the lead researcher, Dr. Thomas C. Peebles, came back to the boarding school.

Edmondston recounted the memory in a local news interview.

Dr. Peebles came back to the school and got me out of classes or study hall or whatever it was and said we found the measles virus and

we've named it the Edmontston strain. Doctors use samples taken from Edmiston to create the

measles vaccine we know today. It took a little less than a decade for the vaccine to roll out to the public.

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