Rubella

It is difficult to determine whether physicians of this period were familiar with rubella, for even the most specialized eighteenth-century books on smallpox and measles do not seem to describe it. In the chroni­cles of King Yongjo (1724-76), however, there are entries noting that the 9-year-old Prince had mea­sles in 1743. Then, when the Prince was 18 years old, he had measles again, and two years later he had “dot-measles.” There was a major epidemic of measles when the Prince was 18 years old, so pre­sumably the Prince really had measles at that time. Because an individual has measles only once, the other episodes could have been rubella and scarla­tina. There are several other examples of such cases.