As early as the ninth century, a Persian doctor wrote about measles. In 1757, Dr. Francis Home, a Scottish doctor, demonstrated that measles is caused by an infectious agent in the blood.

Measles became a nationally notifiable disease in the United States in 1912, requiring doctors and laboratories to report all diagnosed cases. An average of 6,000 measles-related deaths were reported per year from 1912 to 1922. In the first half of the 20th century, nearly all children got measles.

Encephalitis (swelling of the brain) was a possible side effect of measles. Other symptoms included high fever, cough, runny nose, red, watery eyes, tiny white spots inside the mouth, red rash, usually beginning at the head.

In 1954, Dr. John Enders and Dr. Thomas C. Peebles collected blood samples from ill students during a measles outbreak in Boston, hoping to isolate the virus and create a vaccine. The successfully isolated the virus from 13-year-old David Edmonston’s blood.

From 1961–1962 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) conducted vaccine trials in West Africa. The study was conducted by Dr. Harry Meyer Jr., Chief of  the Section on General Virology in the Laboratory of Virology and Rickettsiology in the Division of Biologics Standards (DBS), Dr. Daniel Hostetler, Jr., and Barbara Bernheim, who spent 6 months in the Republic of Upper Volta in West Africa. They used the live attenuated Edmonston strain measles vaccine developed by Dr. John Enders at Harvard University. The NIH team and the eight 3-member Voltan teams that they trained together vaccinated more than 731,000 children between the ages of seven months and four years.