It starts with a breath
The virus lodges in the mouth and throat,
makes its way to the lymph nodes,
and begins to migrate from cell to cell
12 days later. It's in the bloodstream
multiplying in the bone marrow and spleen
Symptoms appear.
High fever
muscle pain headache and weakness
Spots appear in the mouth and throat, rupturing, releasing virus into the saliva
Next it attacks the skin
A rash forms
Then fluid-filled blisters on the face and torso, walking down the extremities
From there, it takes its ordinary, modified, malignant, or hemorrhagic forms
Death rates, depending on the form, ranged from 30 to over 90%
This is smallpox
a disease that appeared in the ancient texts of India and has been found in Egyptian pharaohs
A virus that ravaged ancient Rome and toppled the indigenous societies of the Americas
A plague so deadly humans have dedicated several gods to the disease
And it's one of only two diseases humans have ever eradicated
Arrangement - Actraiser [Birth of the people]
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It's difficult to overestimate the impact of small pox on human history
From killing monarchs
to paving the way for colonialism in the Americas, the Pacific Islands, and Australia
it was a disease that, like tuberculosis, seemed like a permanent fact of life
In eighteenth century Europe, an estimated 400,000 people died from it every year
and most people got it during their lifetimes
It's high mortality rate for children
--at times 80%--
was a major factor in lowering lifespans
But that's the view from orbit; because on an individual level,
this disease was even worse
those infected needed constant care,
meaning it easily passed to caregivers,
wiping out whole families
And survivors experienced
the permanent effects
from deep pitted facial scars
to the loss of eyelashes
to blindness
This was so common
that ladies etiquette books advised on how to properly console a friend
whose beauty had been ravaged by the disease
The only guard against smallpox
was a process called variolation,
where a doctor would cut open the pustule of an infected patient,
dry the extracted material, then rub it into a cut on the arm of a healthy patient
This procedure was brought to England in
1718
by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
who witnessed the procedure in the Ottoman Empire, where her husband was serving as the British ambassador
while Europeans had heard of the practice,
Lady Mary became an advocate for bringing the procedure to England,
having both her own children variolated and
got permission to test it successfully on six prisoners at Newgate
By 1722, members of the royal family were being variolated
now variolation was not vaccination
It was giving someone a weakened version of full-blown smallpox
But it was better than nothing
In experiments at the time, about 2 percent of people died from the procedure, versus the 14 percent of natural infections
But the infected person also became contagious,
putting friends and family at risk
and requiring a period of quarantine
in other words
It was both extremely expensive and only available to the rich, who could afford professional care and to stop working
One of those variolated was a teenage boy named Edward Jenner and the procedure was the talk of the school
Everyone had an opinion, even the milkmaid, who said she didn't need it
Yeah, because you see, she already had cow pox, she said, and people who get cow pox never get smallpox
it was a statement that stuck with Jenner for decades: as he finished school, as he apprenticed under the great surgeon John Hunter, as he
returned home to become a county doctor, and while fooling around with hot air balloons and zoological pursuits, eventually, this offhand
comment would lead him to develop something that would save more lives than any other discovery in history
In 1796 a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmus came to him, exhibiting signs of cow pox
Remembering the mention from his youth, he asked the young woman whether she'd ever had smallpox
She hadn't. Having studied both animals and people, Jenner knew diseases could pass between them
But cow pox was a mild disease, causing mere ligence on hands and arms and also not very infectious person-to-person
Was it possible that an infection with the mild cow pox could provide immunity from smallpox?
He decided to test it on James Phillips, the son of his gardener, who was 8 years old now
That could be seen as wildly unethical today
but in generous defense part of it was likely practical
Smallpox was so endemic that children were the only people who hadn't had it at one time or another and if he were right this
would be one child who had never have to face its horrors
We assume he had his father's permission, but it is worth mentioning that we don't know Philips' part of the story
So, he gave Philips cow pox, then tried to variolate him with smallpox
No symptoms
The kid was immune but not only that he discovered that cow pox could be transmitted person to person, making
vaccination much easier. And that was the term
he created: vaccinations, from his new Latin name for cow pox, which literally meant smallpox of the cow
He conducted 23 more experimental vaccinations, including on his infant son, and submitted a paper to the Royal Society
Now Jenner was not the first to vaccinate with cow pox
It had been proposed or carried out a half dozen times already
But none of those incidents were published, studied, or publicized. Jenner, by contrast, made promoting vaccination his life's work
But not everyone believed Jenner's work, not initially. Attempts to replicate his results
sometimes failed due to specimen contamination and because there were no standardized methods of vaccination. Some doctors who tried the person-to-person procedure
Accidentally transmitted more than cow pox. He hikes imagine that awkward doctor's appointment
Congratulations, you're now immune to smallpox
also, um you now have
syphilis and these unfortunate incidents while more than one in a million helped feed a strong backlash against
Vaccination some objections were religious people who thought that vaccination interfered with the divine plants or polluted the human form with animal matter
Some objections were tragically financial and some doctors objected to it because variolation was a lucrative procedure
They didn't want to abandon and of course some objections were ego-driven because who was this country doctor to tell people how to practice medicine
Anti vaccination leagues and societies formed including a few with let's just say ill informed
Positions one famous political cartoon showed a cow's head emerging from people's bodies
After getting Jenner's vaccine others claimed that the vaccine itself could cause diseases like syphilis rather than transfer them via
Contamination but despite the opposition Jenner worked to promote vaccination as safe and important
He freely shared the process with doctors abroad sending it to America and France Napoleon
Insisted that his troops be vaccinated and even though he was at war with the United Kingdom
Presented Jenner with a medal for saving so many French lives
actually
Jenner was so respected in France that he was sent to negotiate the return of prisoners of war in 1803 a Spanish expedition
brought Jenner's vaccine to Latin America the Philippines and China a
Humanitarian mission only slightly undercut by the fact that to keep the cowpox alive during the voyage
They had to enlist twenty-two orphans as successive carriers of the virus
But Jenner had spent so much time promoting vaccinations that he had neglected his own medical practice and his money began to run dry
Still he set up a Hut in his backyard calling it the temple of vaccinia where he gave out free
Vaccinations to anyone who could not afford it seeing how his public work had affected him
And seeing how he had not tried to profit from vaccinations in 1802
Parliament granted him ten thousand pounds for his work and then another twenty thousand five years later in
1821 he was appointed the physician extraordinary of King George the fourth, but died shortly afterward Jenner's work
however continued in
1813 the US Congress passed legislation
ensuring the public had access to the vaccine and started to vaccinate its extremely vulnerable Native American population in 1832 by
1853 the vaccination was compulsory for infants in England though opposition rolled that back in 1907 and
Opposition was not always peaceful in 1904 a mandatory
Vaccination law in Brazil caused a revolt and 30 people died in street fighting in India people often preferred
Variolation because the use of cattle in producing vaccine was at odds with the animal stature in Hinduism
But then in 1958 something amazing happened a Soviet health minister asked the members of the World Health
Organization to form a global campaign to eradicate smallpox
the US and Soviet Union would end up donating 80 percent of the vaccine used in the effort and by
1979 one of the greatest efforts of cold war cooperation had yielded an amazing result
Smallpox now only existed in the lab less than 200 years after the first vaccine smallpox was gone
Mankind can never forget that you have lived read a letter of thanks Jenna received in 1806
Future nations will know by history only that the loathsome smallpox has existed and by you has been extirpated
Fervent wishes for your health Thomas Jefferson. See you next time everybody
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"Extra History - Odds and Ends" by Sean Kiner and Dean Kiner