Smallpox Flashcards
What does Green say about the origins of smallpox?
It has the weak narrative
Where is smallpox originated from?
- Horn of Africa
- mutated from other kinds of pox like cowpox
What is unique about what kinds of host can catch smallpox?
Smallpox is unique to humans
Contamination (3)
- infects the lungs, where the virus replicates in the cells
- incubation ca. 12 days
- body becomes awash with dead cells
symptoms (5)
- fever, headaches, backaches
- rash, esp of sebaceous glands
- 10-50% mortality
- infection before rash
- infectious until last scab is gone (4 weeks)
How did it spread to the New World?
- African tribes already had the disease when they were stolen to become slaves
- the sick were often sent to the coasts, where they would be often end up being captured
What happened to the Taino population when Columbus landed?
1492 population; 250,000
1517 population: only 14,000 remained
Hernando Cortès and his conquest of Mexico
- landed in 1519 in Cuba where sp had claimed 1/3 of the population
- revered as. God since he was relatively immune to smallpox
- defeated an Aztec force of 5000 with an army of 900
How do Jesuit Missionaries come into this?
They would carry the smallpox from Europe with them on their missions, where those they were preaching to would get infected
How was smallpox mainly spread to North America?
Colonisers, traders, and, Jesuit missionaries
What was the settlers’ response to smallpox?
- God’s will
- practiced quarantine against the First Nations
what happened to the Huron population?
population halved between 1636 and 1640
extinct by 1650
How did the settlers use smallpox?
They gave Indians blankets from the small plague hospital as a form of chemical warfare
Pontiac’s Rebellion
1763-1766
- Bouquet suggests that Amherst uses blankets to inoculate the Indians
- Amherst: you would do well to innoculate the Indians by means of blankets
Who first came up with the idea of inoculation to generate immunity?
Lady Mary Worley Montague
How did Montague experiment?
tested it on her brother and herself
Where did the idea of engrafting first come from?
letter from Constantinople 1717
Cotton Mather
had a slave called Onesimus who was inoculated when he was at home in Africa
Resistance to Mather’s plan
- people believed that sp was God’s will
- received death threats and attacks
What is the main risk of smallpox?
you catch smallpox and can transmit it to others
Smallpox as a fact of life: statistics
- 10th leading cause of death
- 1/3 of childhood deaths
- leading cause of blindness
Egalitarian disease
- Kills everyone
- William of Orange, Louis XIV, Louis XV
Edward Jenner
- observed cow pox
- noticed some old traditions of how cowpox = immunity to smallpox
- invented vaccinations through experiments on other people
Main fears of the Anti-Vax movement (2)
- libertarians feared encroachment of the state
- didn’t like the idea of animals inside them, saw vaccinated women ‘wandering fields to embrace the bull’ (acting like cows)
- religious reasons
- Jenner wrongfully insisted on life immunity
- Jenner as a sympathiser of the French Rev
Acceptance of the smallpox vaccine
- 1807 becomes compulsory in many European countries
- 1853 England’s Vaccination act
- 1898: conscientious objector option
Vaccine in the Civil War
- made mandatory, but there were many new rural recruits
- no central authority overseeing anything
- killed over 600,000 troops on either side
Misdiagnosis of sp
girl with chicken pox was diagnosed with sp, was treated as such, and died
Subterfuge of sp
- 1881: didn’t want to reveal that railway workers had smallpox so that work could continue
- 1882: NY Sanitary Dept officer concealed it to keep up image that he fixed it
Smallpox considered eradicated
1980
WHO
- led campaign to eradicate it
- revitalised in 1966
- oversaw and tested vaccines
