John Camarella
Artifact #4
Scientist and historians both believe that Smallpox has been with man since the beginning of recorded history. It has plagued many great nations of the ancient world and very much became an aspect of the culture. At some point in every person’s life before the beginning of the successful human intervention, it was almost like a rite of passage for each person to have to have to go through in which, if they were lucky, would not be brutally scared/blinded by the scaring left from the scabs. It became so prevalent that many cultures had their own personal god to represent the disease or one to pray to for the disease to be cured/reduced. For example, the Hindu’s would pray to the goddess Shitala in order for her to prevent Smallpox from coming to wherever the prayers were originating from or when infected for a cure (Powerpoint slides)
Due to the high mortality rates and the horrible effects that the disease would have, doctors from every country would try their own possible remedies in order to prevent or cure the disease. Interventions that were used were bloodletting, leeches, fasting, laxatives, purgative, diuretics, heat/sweat therapy, and cold therapy (Powerpoint Slides). A popular treatment method that originated in Japan known as the Red Therapy came into use around the 10th Century. It involved with putting a person suffering from Smallpox in a room that was completely red and basically turns it into a sweat room with a fire raging. This would ultimately make the person suffering from the disease feel worse due to its ineffective treatment style (Powerpoint slides). Many historians believe today that it is possible that more patients died from doctor interventions to cure this disease then the disease actually killing off the patients.
It was only until the beginning of the 1700s that a treatment was stumbled upon that actually began to have positive effects in at least preventing the illness. Middle Eastern scholars and physicians had found that if you took the puss from an infected pox on the skin and inserted it into an unaffected individual, the disease would take hold of that individual but would be less powerful giving much better chances of survival than trying to survive Smallpox. This became known as inoculation (Powerpoint slides). Instead of having a 30% chance of dying to the disease, inoculation only had a 1% chance of death thus giving much higher odds of survival then there had ever been before. The Chinese had a different method that was not quite as effective as inoculation, but nevertheless better than nothing. Their method consisted of putting a piece of scab from one of the pox up an unaffected individual’s nose causing them to contract the illness and develop immunity that way (Powerpoint slides).
In the latter half of the 1700s, a surgeon by the name of Edward Jenner began to conduct experiments on a rural remedy for preventing Smallpox. It was said that milkmaids who contracted cowpox never would develop Smallpox and thus be saved from the horrible disease. Using this, he inoculated his own son with a similar disease to cowpox, known as swinepox, and saw that after his son had recovered from the very mild disease that is son did not respond at all to the smallpox inoculation. To test this further, he inoculated someone who had never had smallpox with cowpox and let him recover just like he had done with his son. Once the individual had recovered, he inoculated the same person with smallpox and noticed that just like his son, there was no reaction to the disease. Thus, the individuals must have developed an immunity to smallpox through the lesser related diseases that would not kill the one suffering. This became known as vaccination and had much higher odds of success and survivability then inoculation itself.
For a while, inoculation and vaccination competed as two ways to prevent smallpox from affecting the individual. Many people did not like the method of vaccination because they didn’t know if it was safe due to it coming from animals. On top of this, many feared that it may be interfering with God’s plan over all of creation by combated the disease in a less natural way. Others worried that the poor population would grow and overthrow the wealthy population due to more surviving the disease than ever before. Eventually, vaccination would win out as the primary source of prevention of Smallpox (Powerpoint Slides)
Eventually, in the 20th Century, it became a priority to eradicate this disease from the face of the earth. The World Health Organization set out to get rid of the disease by using draconian public health measures. Once cases were found, they would isolate and quarantine all those involved and then vaccinate everyone that were in direct contact. Then, they would quarantine the area around which the infected individual was and anyone that they could have possibly come into contact with and vaccinate them as well. Then they would extend this a little further out and vaccinate all those individuals. Thus, they would only have to vaccinate individuals that were around the disease and avoided having to vaccinate every single person (Powerpoint slides). Eventually, this leads to a great reduction in the number of cases that were found and lead the World Health Organization to begin surveillance for any new cases. Once a case came up, they performed the draconian measures and contained the outbreak. By 1980, the World Health Organization had successfully eradication Smallpox from the world (Powerpoint slides).