Smallpox is a dangerous and debilitating disease that is known for the small pockes full of puss. Smallpox used to be the major killer of babies. Smallpox is transmitted through face to face contact, body fluids, scabs, contaminated objects, and airborne transmission. Even if someone survived this disease they were covered in scars afterward. This disease swept over the entire world and killed hundreds of millions of people over the centuries. In just the 20^th century by itself it caused the death of about 300 million people. In living in an area of a smallpox epidemic it would be normal to see the disease in almost everyone. The only thing left to do is to pray that you don’t die from the disease yourself. I can imagine there was a lot of fear during this time not knowing who was going to die next.

During that time, they had very primitive healing techniques because they didn’t understand how the disease worked such as bloodletting, leeches, fasting, laxatives, purgatives, diuretics, sweat therapy, and cold therapy. A lot of these “treatments” ended up hurting the patient instead of helping them. The first person to create a real vaccination for this disease was Edward Jenner. He used the infection of cow pox to use as a vaccine for smallpox. After that it became widespread to everyone. Even the possibility to a cure to this dangerous disease made it worth getting. The vaccine was distributed through orphans to carry it around from place to place.

The objections were that it interfered with Gods plan, smallpox reduces the poor population, and they didn’t know how safe the vaccine was. Vaccines became the better choice due to the prevention of bloodborne illnesses. The World Health Organization started a global effort in eradicating the disease through international reports. They also used selective control to prevent mass contamination. Problems with this include adverse reaction to the vaccine and being able to find those people contaminated before they contaminated anyone else. Eventually the disease was completely eradicated globally.