And, uh, the part about the murders…
If they come up with anything, will you post here about it, please? I’ll never remember to seek it out.
Will do!
I had not heard (nor can tell from a casual search) that there was ever a mandatory quarantine for people with rubella. We’re not talking smallpox or even leprosy here, but a typically rather mild disease whose major consequence is severe birth defects when women are infected during a critical period of pregnancy.
The first report of congenital rubella syndrome came out in 1941, and it’s unclear that word would have spread so fast for anyone to have been quarantined anywhere in the U.S. simply for being sick with rubella.
I’d like to see further documentation on this score before ruling out an element of urban legend here.
Incidentally, the last big epidemic of rubella in this country was in 1964, with 20,000 cases of congenital rubella syndrome resulting. Nothing on that scale has been seen again here, thanks to the rubella vaccine. However, in that time new generations have grown up without fear of the disease but with unwarranted fears of vaccines, so a resurgence is far from impossible.
Yeah, I’m the OP over there - I asked Bricker if he’d mind and he said go for it 
If they get anywhere, I’ll report back.
Thinking about this, myself and at least one of my brothers had rubella (it was called “german measles”) in the sixties and I don’t recall a quarantine. I may be misremembering of course, or we may have been quarantined and I wasn’t aware of it. I’ll have to ask my mother.
It shouldn’t be too difficult to find out if people actually were quarantined for it in the forties.
Jeez, I miss Eve. She’d be able to set the record straight without even putting down her spoon of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. 
What happened to her? I’ve noticed people mentioning she was gone, for a long time, but I wasn’t sure why.
If memory serves, a new job with added responsibilities that prevented coming here on any kind of a regular basis.
I watched a DVD of “Laura” a few months ago; among the DVD’s special features was a “Biography” (produced for broadcast on that network, I believe) documentary on Gene Tierney. It went into quite a lot of detail about the rubella contact and its consequences – I don’t believe it’s an urban legend.
Really a very sad story.
It isn’t being disputed that the poor lady contracted Rubella in early pregnancy and that her daughter was born with the associated mental and physical handicaps of congenital rubella syndrome. The bit that it would be very interesting to confirm is the story of the fan coming up to her years later and, in essence, without realising it, boasting about infecting her. Does the biography go into much detail about that aspect?
I apologize – I thought my message made it clear, but on re-read, it didn’t. The documentary did say, as I remember, that Tierney was approached by the fan (some years) later, and that the fan said that she’d broken quarantine to meet her (not in a boasting manner, but simply to demonstrate how badly she wanted to meet Tierney).
Because I watched it via Netflix, I can’t review the DVD’s documentary again. Maybe someone on this thread has it at home.
I bring progress from the thread on this on the snopes message board. Several people added info but pride of place probably goes to poster Bonnie who, as usual, has dug up a very impressive set of cites and makes a compelling case for the story being true, really. Or at least more plausible than I thought previously.
Some key things discovered:
[ul]
[li]The story was reported as early as 1958 in Time Magazine and widely reported in 1959 in, amongst other papers, The Washington Post.[/li][li]German Measles quarantining was a regular occurrence in the 1940s and indeed it was something of a raging epidemic.[/li][/ul]
The link to the thread contains cites for the above and much more.
A couple of things from that linked thread:
- One story has the encounter between the mystery woman and Tierney as follows:
"A female Marine who was there told me she had skipped quarantine that night just to come and meet me. A year later, I met the same girl again on the tennis courts at a friend’s home in Hollywood. She reminded me of the night she had broken quarantine.
“I got the German measles,” she said. “Did you get them, too?”
That account makes it sound like both Tierney and the other woman contracted rubella from a third source (it would be possible, of course, that someone exposed to a person with rubella might be confined to prevent them coming down with the disease and spreading it).
-
A number of the anecdotes reference “measles” and not “German measles”.
-
I’d still like to see solid evidence that German measles cases were officially quarantined during that era.
Was, and is, except for the teratogenic effects. The reason only women are vaccinated is not that men don’t catch rubella: it’s that men don’t catch pregnancy.
If it helps, here’s a handful of reports of military quarantines issued in first half of 1941 aimed specifically at halting the spread of German measles.
A report in *The Los Angeles Times *indicates that a drill instructor at the San Diego Marine Corps had been diagnosed with German measles. Medical officers “*mmediately ordered him confined to the base dispensary for a two weeks’ quarantine period.” [“German Measles Invade Marine Base,” 18 March 1941, Pg. 14.]
Three cases of German measles were reported to have hit the 43rd Division at Camp Blanding, Florida. “Officers of the [118th Medical Regiment] did not fear that the disease would amount to an epidemic, although as a precautionary measure, both units were placed under a working quarantine.” [“Rifle Range Practice to Come Next,” The Hartford Courant, 3 April 1941, Pg. 2.]
Rubella popped up among 15 members of the 209th Coast Artillery at Camp Edwards, Massachusetts, in April, 1941. The commanding officer of the 208th Medical Detachment noted that “while we thought it best to establish a ‘working quarantine’ for the regiment as a whole, this is merely a precautionary measure to prevent the further spread of German measles.” [“15 Measles Cases Spotted at Edwards,” The Hartford Courant, 18 April 1941, Pg. 2.]
Where is Eve when we need her? If anyone could get to the bottom of this Eve could, I am sure…
Thanks, Tammi for digging out that information. I suppose it makes sense even in not-quite-yet wartime, for military units to maintain preparedness by limiting the spread of even a relatively mild form of infectious disease.
I am somewhat more inclined to believe the Tierney story now.
I just remembered that the first name of the actress in The Mirror Crack’d was Marina, and the woman IRL is supposed to have been a Marine…
I think that just might point to the story being true. If it were the other way around, I’m not sure Gene Tierney would’ve made that particular connection.
That might be a holdover from the 1918 flu outbreak, with infected soldiers being sent out and spreading the disease.