Smallpox devastated the human population for many years. It wasn’t until the creation of a vaccine by Edward Jenner that we were even able to think about eradicating the disease. Although before the vaccine was found many other pseudo-treatments and treatments were used to try and help solve the mysterious disease.
One of the big problems with pseudo-treatments was that they brought together a bunch of sick people without having a true treatment and allowed the disease to fester in these areas causing many others to become infected. The first of the pseudo treatments was a form of quack remedy. Quack remedies are those that are people claiming to have medical training and have the ability to save people, but in reality Quackers had no skill and no knowledge of anything medicine. An example of quacking is when alchemist would tell people that they could transmute baser metals into gold and when pseudo-scientist told people that if they drank the pus and scrapes of small pox that it would cure the disease. Both of these examples couldn’t be more wrong and may have led to more harm. Another form of pseudo-treatment was prayer. Prayer was more of a morale booster than anything else. As the doctor Edward Jenner noticed, prayer was not able to stop him from contracting the disease, but it was also what kept him pushing towards finding a cure for the disease. The next pseudo-treatment that was used was the belief that the color red would somehow help aid in the eradication of smallpox. Once all of the pseudo-science treatments were proven wrong is when the true science behind smallpox and treatments were used.[1]
The treatments that were science and medicine based and used for smallpox include variolation, insufflation and vaccination. Variolation was the use of a lancet to scrape the pus and material from a person with smallpox, then to introduce the infected lancet to another individual in the hopes that this small introduction would create an immunity for the person being introduced to the disease. The harm that could come from this treatment is that other diseases that were blood and bodily fluid borne could then spread and cause a whole other epidemic on its own.[2]The next medical treatment was insufflation, which was used by doctors to blow dried out scabs and smallpox powders into the nostril of individuals to try and create the same effect of immunization. Again the spreading of other diseases like syphilis was very common. The final science based treatment was vaccination which was created by Edward Jenner to find a substitute to variolation. He noticed that the dairy maids that were infected with cowpox were immune to smallpox, so he infected a young boy with cowpox. Jenner then exposed the young boy to smallpox and noticed that he was immune to the disease. This led Jenner to notice that his new treatment called vaccination after cows had the ability to provide immunity to the population from smallpox and that it could do this without the risk of contracting other infectious diseases. [3]
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All of these treatments have had social lash-backs and haven’t worked as many times as they did work. Vaccinations even though they have proven to work are now being shunned because they seem to cause autism. As we have learned in class the people that believe this phenomenon have no idea what they are talking about and are a danger to society. The eradication of the smallpox disease was due to the vaccination that was created by Edward Jenner and the advances in science and medicine that have allowed for tracking of diseases throughout the world.
[1]https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/smallpox-and-pseudomedicine/
[2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/
[3]https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/smallpox/sp_vaccination.html