I was a child before there were vaccines, even before the polio vaccine was developed and put into popular use. I spent many weeks in bed and missing school because I got measles multiple times, mumps, rubella, and chicken pox. Thankfully, I never got whooping cough. No one knew yet what caused polio. Public pools were closed during the summers in hopes of avoiding contagion. People even suspected stray dogs (of which there were many) of being polio carriers. I was scared and didn't want to spend the rest my life in an iron lung (please Google Images for that). Thankfully, I was spared that too.
Years later when I had children during the '70s, I made sure they were inoculated against those diseases I had endured and those I had escaped.