Preventing Grace & Immunization: Women Who Protected Your Family from Whooping Cough
Big Pharma didn't invent vaccines. For over 100 years, American women have pioneered breakthroughs. Dr. Pearl Kendrick, Dr. Grace Eldering, and microbiologist Loney Clinton Gordon were a few.
Women in the U.S. have been earning medical degrees for over 130 years. As women dissected cadavers, peered through microscopes, and published research, many were involved in the broader reform movement of the early 1900s.
Some women in the late 1800s and early 1900s trained to be missionary doctors overseas; some came from Quaker backgrounds; others were Jewish; many engaged in the suffrage movement, or WCTU, or YWCA; some dodged bombings as contract surgeons in France in World War I. As women drove the reform movement and shaped the new field of public health, so did their whistleblowing, confrontations with corruption, and advocacy for patients’ well-being.
Big Pharma didn’t invent vaccines.
But women have rolled up their sleeves for over a century, studying germs, isolating strains of bacteria, developing or improving diagnostic tools, working in the middle of dangerous outbreaks, reducing disease transmission, teaching impoverished moms about hygiene and germs, testing serums, publishing results, arguing with the AMA about whether or not high infant mortality had to be inevitable -
the number of women who provided critical insights on germs, how they spread, and how to reduce their impact on lives and families is remarkable.
How We’re Spared: The Ways We Experience Grace
Many of these women had been raised with a faith background. Sometimes, Christians talk about “preventing grace.” One way to think of “preventing grace” is to consider the ways God’s grace pops up in ways that protect us or prevent harm. What matters is that prevention is a gift; absence of harm or destructive influence is a gift; protection from what can impair or destroy your body or your soul is a gift. In a universe of free will, choices, and cause and effect, you and I are influenced by things outside our control. I did nothing to merit being born in a place and moment when many horrible illnesses have been largely eradicated. People who haven’t been born where that’s the case did nothing to merit their circumstance either.
When we look at the stories of some of the women who performed early research, tested serums or antitoxins or inoculations, who labored under skepticism or tight funding, and when we see the scale of outcomes, the state statistical charts, the newspaper archives, it’s impossible to ignore that their work led to a significant plummet in painful, sometimes permanently debilitating, sometimes fatal infections. (One polio survivor who just passed away in 2024 spent most of his life in an iron lung machine.)
So whatever one thinks of the practice of bundling multiple immunizations in one jab or the relative necessity of some disease preventatives versus others, for every child who wasn’t debilitated by whooping cough, whose immune system wasn’t torpedoed by measles, whose loved one didn’t die of influenza or polio - the work these women gave for others was a means of preventing grace for those families.
Did my great-grandparents know about the scarlet fever vaccine program in the 1920s and 30s? I don’t know. But when scarlet fever came to their home, it didn’t leave without taking one of their daughters. Antibiotic treatment wasn’t available yet; prevention like immunization was the only tool available. (I use “immunization” or “vaccination” to mean the administration of a live, dead, or weakened germ so your immune system perks up, fights it, then remembers it, so that when your body encounters The Real Deal your defense system isn’t caught off-guard.)
Here are some women who helped families avoid or survive pertussis - commonly known as “whooping cough.”
Painful & Contagious: “Whooping Cough”
“Until the mid-20th century, there was nothing anyone could do to prevent the disease. It was so contagious that one child with pertussis was likely to infect half his classmates and all of his siblings at home. Pertussis killed up to 7,500 Americans a year in the early 1930s, most of them infants and young children. Survivors sometimes suffered permanent physical and cognitive damage.”1
Though a French bacteriologist tried to develop a pertussis inoculation almost twenty years before Dr. Pearl Kendrick began working in Michigan, the vaccine couldn’t produce consistent results: by 1931, the FDA withdrew approval for the existing pertussis vaccines available in the United States.2 Kendrick, along with Dr. Grace Elderling and microbiologist Loney Clinton Gordon, pioneered an effective vaccine that would prevent children from enduring, being disabled by, or dying from the intensely painful whooping cough. (See photos here.)
“In 1932, Kendrick received a ScD in bacteriology from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. On her return to Michigan she asked CC Young, state Director of Laboratories, for permission to work on ‘whooping cough’; he allegedly replied ‘If you are having any fun working on whooping cough, go ahead.’ Accompanied by bacteriologist Grace Eldering, who had joined the Department's laboratories in 1928, Kendrick ‘set out’ every day after ‘the laboratory closed’ to collect Bordetella pertussis specimens.”3
“‘We learned about the disease and the depression at the same time. Many of the families were very poor and their living conditions pitiful...We listened to sad stories told by desperate fathers who could find no work. We collected specimens by the light of kerosene lamps, from whooping, vomiting, strangling children. We saw what the disease could do. In the laboratory we isolated the pertussis bacillus, not from every patient, but from most of them in the early stages of the disease...The cultures were saved and studied in every possible way.’” - Dr. Grace Elderling
Meanwhile, microbiologist lab assistant Loney Clinton Gordon had struggled to find employers who would hire her because she was Black.4 “As Kendrick and Eldering developed the first version of their vaccine, they realized they needed to isolate a new strain of the bacteria, to make the vaccine more effective. That’s what Kendrick hired Loney Clinton Gordon to find.”
As Clinton Gordon shared in an oral history interview, “‘I knew what my mission was to be. To help find the culture with sufficient virulence to make the vaccine.’ It was not an easy thing to do. ‘You have to be expert at culturing the bacilli,’ says Shapiro-Shapin, recalling the interview. ‘And she was someone who had that gift.’”5 The difference among strains of pertussis was surprisingly varied:
“One pertussis strain could be up to 10,000 times more virulent than another, and finding the right strain was crucial to improving the vaccine. ‘Every day I worked so hard,’ [Clinton Gordon] said. ‘Millions of plates.’”6 She continued, “‘So this one day, I went in and I said ‘Okay God this has to be the day. And bingo, there it was.’”7
Whooping Cough Research on a “Shoestring” Budget
Before bringing Clinton Gordon on board, Elderling and Kendrick had stitched together a patchwork of support8 for what started as an after-hours research project. “Kendrick and Eldering brought together a diverse coalition of local and state public health departments, physicians, citizens’ groups, women’s groups, and parent–teacher associations that would provide organizational support and funding. By building relationships with local physicians and the Grand Rapids Health Department, Kendrick and Eldering ensured a steady supply of cough plates containing B. pertussis samples.”9 With community support and incredibly tight funding, they managed to change the course of whooping cough in the United States.
“Using Michigan Department of Health resources and local and federal funding, Kendrick and Eldering developed standardized diagnostic tools; modified and improved extant vaccines; conducted the first successful, large-scale, controlled clinical trial of pertussis vaccine; and participated in international efforts to standardize and disseminate the vaccine.”10
“‘There weren't any headlines,’ Loney Clinton Gordon said of her work on the whooping cough vaccine. ‘You achieved something and you were glad for that.’” - Remembering Loney Clinton Gordon
The Results: Kendrick, Eldering, and Clinton Gordon Empowered More Kids to Reach Adulthood
By 1944, “the American Medical Association added Kendrick and Eldering’s vaccine to its list of recommended immunizations. As a result, incidence of pertussis in the United States fell by more than half just in that decade. Deaths dropped from 7,518 in 1934—the peak year for pertussis cases—to just ten a year by the early 1970s. Throughout that period, Kendrick traveled to other countries, from Mexico to Russia…with similar success in saving children’s lives.”11
Eldering and Kendrick also pioneered the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis combination, or DTP, “a forerunner of the vaccine that now routinely protects 85 percent of the world’s children. To standardize the vaccine everywhere, Kendrick, Eldering and [Dr.] Margaret Pittman, at the National Institutes of Health, also developed what has become the required method for testing the effectiveness of every batch of whole-cell pertussis vaccine worldwide.”12
“A life saved by prevention cannot even be identified. Who are the men and women living today who would be dead from whooping cough had it not been for Pearl Kendrick’s vaccine? We can conclude with reasonable certainty that several hundred thousand of them are now leading productive lives, in this country alone.
But who are they? Name one. You can’t do it and neither can I.…
The accomplishments of disease prevention are statistical and epidemiological. Where’s the news value, the human interest in that? Dr. Kendrick never became rich and, outside a relatively small circle of informed friends and colleagues, never became famous. All she did was save hundreds of thousands of lives at modest cost. Secure knowledge of that fact is the very best reward.” - Dean Richard Remington in the University of Michigan School of Public Health newsletter, after Dr. Pearl Kendrick’s death
“All she did was save hundreds of thousands of lives at modest cost.”
What a beautifully loaded understatement on the impact of Dr. Kendrick, along with Dr. Eldering and Loney Clinton Gordon. After work hours, with scant funding, during the Depression, through a mosaic of funding and support, these womens’ curiosity, hard work, commitment, and research popped open an umbrella of preventing grace to shield families around the world from losing a child to the stranglehold of whooping cough.
“Okay God this has to be the day. And bingo, there it was.”
The Unsung Heroes Who Ended a Deadly Plague by Richard Conniff, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/unsung-heroes-ended-deadly-plague-180979547/
The Kendrick-Eldering-(Frost) Pertussis Vaccine Field Trial by Harry M. Marks, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1861415/
The Kendrick-Eldering-(Frost) Pertussis Vaccine Field Trial by Harry M. Marks, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1861415/
How Three Women Led the Fight Against Pertussis by Matthew Wills, https://daily.jstor.org/how-three-women-led-the-fight-against-pertussis/
Remembering Loney Clinton Gordon: “You Achieved Something and You Were Glad for That” by Dustin Dwyer, https://www.michiganpublic.org/environment-science/2021-02-12/remembering-loney-clinton-gordon-you-achieved-something-and-you-were-glad-for-that
The Unsung Heroes Who Ended a Deadly Plague by Richard Conniff, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/unsung-heroes-ended-deadly-plague-180979547/
Remembering Loney Clinton Gordon: “You Achieved Something and You Were Glad for That” by Dustin Dwyer, https://www.michiganpublic.org/environment-science/2021-02-12/remembering-loney-clinton-gordon-you-achieved-something-and-you-were-glad-for-that
How Three Women Led the Fight against Pertussis by Matthew Wills, https://daily.jstor.org/how-three-women-led-the-fight-against-pertussis/
Pearl Kendrick, Grace Eldering, and the Pertussis Vaccine by Carolyn G. Shapiro-Shapin, https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/16/8/10-0288_article
Pearl Kendrick, Grace Eldering, and the Pertussis Vaccine by Carolyn G. Shapiro-Shapin, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3298325/
The Unsung Heroes Who Ended a Deadly Plague, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/unsung-heroes-ended-deadly-plague-180979547/
The Unsung Heroes Who Ended a Deadly Plague, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/unsung-heroes-ended-deadly-plague-180979547/
Featured image of sculpture Adulation: The Future of Science, depicting Dr. Pearl Kendrick, Dr. Grace Eldering, and Loney Clinton Gordon. Photo credit: Nathan Bierma 2024 via Historical Markers Database.
Elizabeth Glass Turner, M.A., is a writer and editor. She is credited as “book doula” for Live Anointed: How the Holy Spirit Sanctifies Men and Women to Lead Together by Rev. Katie Lance and line editor for This Holy Calling; she contributed entries to the latest edition of The Historical Dictionary of Methodism; an essay to The Philosophy of Sherlock Holmes; and a chapter to The Journey of Grief: Traversing Our Sorrows Together. Elizabeth interviewed C.S. Lewis’ stepson Douglas Gresham as well as author Kay Warren and met Sir Antony Flew, Charles Colson, Rev. Dr. Marilyn McCord Adams, and Father Richard John Neuhaus. However, the first person she was excited to meet was Roscoe Orman - Gordon from Sesame Street.
She pastored a small rural church through revitalization, worked with international students in campus ministry, collaborated across denominations with World Methodist Evangelism, and crafted content for higher ed, for-profit, and non-profit entities. Currently, Elizabeth is working on a series of articles on women pastors during WWII before launching season two of FireFall.
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