There's a series on Amazon Prime, Dr. Finlay based on the series of short stories by AJ Cronin. This particualr seeries takes up just after the end of WWII with John Finlay returning from six years as a medical officer in the British army to return to Scotland to a civilian medical practice.
Ah, the good old days before antibiotics had much use outside the military. One episode concerns a local diagnosed with small pox. The doctors know where he got it. Since he can't remember who all he came into contact with and who they might have been with it's vaccinate the village and the locals ASAP. And curious little me started looking up the history of vaccinations. This article is clearer than I could ever be.
Most of the histories start with Edward Jenner sn Rnhlidh physician who paid attention to stories that agricultural workers who mainly worked with cattle didn't get small pox. The virus has several cousins including horse pox and cow pox. Jenner paid attention and eventually started using material from cow pox to innoculate patients against small pox. It worked. But that wasn't the beginning.
There are no records that name the first bright man or woman that realized that patients who survived the disease the first time didn't get it again. There are records from Ming dynasty China in the mid to late sixteenth century. Scabs from small pox victims were powdered and the material blown into prospective patients noses. While the death rate from this practice ranged from .05 to 2.0 percent that was far lower than the 20 to 30 percent death toll observed in epidemics.
Records of the practice are found in Turkey, Persia and Africa. In England and the colonies small incisions would be made in the wrists and/or ankles and extremely small amounts of the powder introduced. The wounds were bound up and, I'm assuming, fingers crossed. John Adams was innoculated in the mid 1760's and his family in 1776. She didn't take the decsion lightly but the disease came in waves of epidemics in the coastal cities of Boston, Philadelphia and Charlston.
The British occuppied Boston and 1775, there was an outbreak of the disease. The British were accused of practicing an early form of germ warfare. Pushing infected people out of the city in hopes of spreading the disease. Since more colonists were rural and didn't travel very far they didn't come into contact with epidemic diseases, such as small pox.
George Washington contracted the disease during a visit to Barbadoes when he was nineteen. He was sick for a month but immune to the disease after that. While he forbade soldiers already in the army in 1777 from being vaccinated the instituted a program of vaccinating new recruits. The first widspread vaccination program in American history.
But this isn't exactly ancient history. My great great grandmother in Kasas wrote letter to her son in Eugene, Oregon back around the turn of the last century. One letter goes on on about how hot it's been. The crops aren't doing so great. And by the way "there are rumors of small pox in the neighborhood." My little heart went pitty pat for awhile. Hasn't been that long ago has it.
Comes to it, a jab in the arm beats having the powdered byproducts of small pox lesions blown up or orherwise applied anyday.
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