Opinion: What we can learn from rows of little tombstones

A few years ago, I visited a cemetery in an old mining town in Utah. My husband and I were struck by the rows of little tombstones. Each tombstone's death date was within a few weeks of each other in the early 1900s. They were all children who had died of diphtheria. As a parent and a physician, it was an all-too-concrete reminder of the toll that infectious diseases used to take on US families and children.