The story that changed how we see vaccines—told through a father's loss.


 Roald Dahl on Measles: Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often


in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.


'Are you feeling all right?' I asked her.


'I feel all sleepy,' she said.


In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.


The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was...in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her. On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunised against measles.


...I dedicated two of my books to Olivia, the first was ‘James and the Giant Peach’. That was when she was still alive. The second was ‘The BFG’, dedicated to her memory after she had died from measles. You will see her name at the beginning of each of these books. And I know how happy she would be if only she could know that her death had helped to save a good deal of illness and death among other children.


Roald Dahl, 1986


"Roald Dahl’s heartbreaking story changed the future of vaccines forever.

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