Artifact 4 Prompt #2

Although smallpox was an incredibly tragic and deadly disease, it also opened the door in the medicine and science world for a great deal of opportunity. The fight against smallpox was significant because it’s the first real time in history that humans figured out how to preemptively fight a major affliction. Through experimentation with different techniques over the course of centuries, humans finally completed enough trial and error to learn how to stop smallpox before it fully rears its ugly head at you.

To be fair, we owe the majority of our success in our fight against smallpox to the Asian world. In the Muslim world, people started doing something almost like a vaccination, called inoculation. In my opinion, this technique is quite unsanitary and a little gross. Inoculation involves taking someone’s smallpox scab and placing it under your own healthy skin using a needle. Exposing yourself to just a little bit of the virus helps the human body prepare to fight the disease when it is legitimately exposed to the full strain.

Also in the Asian world is a slightly less stomach-turning smallpox fighting technique known as insufflation. Insufflation also involves the use of someone else’s smallpox scabs, but this time instead of injecting it under your skin, you take the scab and put it in your nose to expose yourself to the disease. In fact, if I were living during the time where smallpox was a threat, insufflation would be the technique I would go with in order to try to avoid catching the disease myself.

All of this smallpox talk can seem dark, but people during this time period actually made the best out of their situation, lightening the mood when possible. In fact, people in England actually had parties at which they would inoculate themselves. Lady Montegue was a huge proponent of things like these, promoting smallpox awareness in England.