Smallpox used to be feared like plague. And it became one of our first great success stories in the war against disease.
Unfortunately that success came too late to do much good for the Native peoples of the Americas, and the Pacific Islanders. With no previous exposure, and thus no genetics of survival, they died in millions.
With no understanding of germs, people of the 1600s did note that those who survived smallpox rarely got it again, and also that it could spread with close contact. With breathtaking daring they developed inoculation… giving someone a shallow cut, and then binding in pustules from a sufferer. The hope was to get (and survive) a very mild case, thus developing immunity.
It worked! But it seemed insane, and was violently opposed. In 1600s Massachusetts every single Puritan minister (the best-educated people in America) supported inoculation, and every doctor (no education required) but one opposed. Reverend Cotton Mather’s house was firebombed, but over time, people could see that it worked. Still, it was risky. Some got REAL sick, and a fair number died, including theologian Jonathan Edwards.
Until Edward Jenner went them one better, recognizing that people who got cowpox – a much milder disease – almost never got smallpox. Correctly concluding that the diseases were related, he created the first true vaccine (from the Latin “vaca,” or cow). It worked, and it did so without the crudities of inoculations that sometimes led to “overdoses.” That was in 1796, exactly 225 years ago. It would take two centuries, but smallpox is just about eradicated.
Not before killing an Egyptian pharaoh, an Aztec emperor, two Inca emperors, two Chinese emperors, two Japanese emperors, at least eight European monarchs, and a king of Buganda, plus millions and millions more. It also killed a lot of people here in the “Genesee Country” in the 1700s and 1800s.
Our Congress passed the Vaccine Act in 1813, placing smallpox vaccine under federal inspection and regulation, meantime taking steps, including free shipment by mail, to encourage its use.
Woodhull had a smallpox outbreak in 1860s, confining victims to a pesthouse, burying them separately, and burning the pesthouse afterward. Beginning in 1882 the state Board of Health asked everyone to get vaccinated, but Elmira and Watertown had cases in 1901, even as Corning had variola (a milder form of the disease).
Dense, aggressive rash, blisters, or pustules are the most obvious symptoms. For “normal” forms, it killed about 30% of those who got it. More powerful strains killed almost everybody. Most of us of a certain age recall the almost-universal childhood ritual of “getting your vaccination,” which is why for most of us smallpox is a matter of distant lands or dusty history. Good thing!
By the 1950s, eradication passed from a fantasy to a goal, with countries rich and poor, communist and capitalist, of every religion, race, and ethnicity rolling up their sleeves – to get the shots, but also to go to work. Smallpox now exists only in a few closely-watched labs. The last natural case was in 1978… fittingly, in Jenner’s homeland of England.
During the gigantic conflicts of the early 1800s, Napoleon rounded up and imprisoned British citizens who happened to be in his realms when war was declared. He refused all calls to release them, until told that one request came from Dr. Jenner. “In that name,” said the emperor who ruled almost all of Europe, “we can refuse nothing.”