November 18, 2017 • 35 mins
We're revisiting a classic episode, all about early strides in treating smallpox, which has been around longer than recorded history. Edward Jenner made great strides in eradicating it.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Today's classic is brought to you by a
tidbit of information that I stumbled across completely at random
while doing research on something else. Entirely. It's about Edward Jenner,
known as the father of immunology thanks to his lifetime
spent working with smallpox vaccines. And we mentioned the work
of the Reverend Cotton, Mother and Dr Zabdiel Boylston in
(00:25):
combating a smallpox outbreak in Boston in one using a
technique called variolation. But what we don't say what Tracy
just learned was it Mother first heard about this practice
from one Seamus, an enslaved man Mother's congregation had bought
for him. Only Semis told Mother about vary elation and
(00:45):
that it was commonly used among Africans. So it seemed
like a good time to re share that old episode
with this new to us tidbit. Will link to an
article from the Hutchins Center for African and African American
Research at Harvard with more and remation about on a Semis.
One last note, we actually say in this show that
smallpox is the only disease that's been eradicated thanks to
(01:08):
humanity's effort. But we learned afterwards that render pest is
another formally declared eradicated in about two years before this
podcast originally came out, so keep that in mind as
you listen. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class
from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
(01:37):
the podcast. I am Tracy Wilson when I'm Polly Fried.
Today we're going to talk about smallpox, super fun topics. Well,
and it's been uh pretty much gone for long enough
that I think most people don't really have a sense
of just what it was like. Like, I think the
closest equivalent most people have today's chicken pox. But even
(01:58):
if that doesn't touch it into of horrifying this No,
even now that we have chicken pox vaccine, a lot
of people have never experienced chicken pox. And I coincidentally
never got chicken pox. What I had to be vaccinated
for it as an a grown up because I never
got it as a child, neither did my brother. So smallpox,
it's not like super chicken pox. It's been around for
(02:20):
longer than recorded history, and it probably originated in Africa
more than ten thousand years ago, and it spread around
the world following migration and trade. We have physical evidence
that it existed as far back as six b C,
thanks to the mummified head of Ramsey's the Fifth which
has evidence of smallpox physically. It was also described in
(02:45):
writing in China and India at about the same time.
But based on all that knowledge, it's pretty clear that
smallpox existed before writing did. Yeah, and there are several
types of smallpox, and there are there's a range of
possible complications that can come from it, but in general, uh,
it causes these small, pus filled lesions on the skin,
(03:07):
and people that have it also get a fever normally
and other flu like symptoms. And when it existed in
the wild, it was fatal and roughly of all cases
for babies, that number was between eight and so a
really high mortality rate. And in the eighteenth century, as
much as ten percent of the population of Europe died
(03:29):
of smallpox every year, and more than three million people
died of smallpox during the twentieth century. Those are numbers
that I bet people were not expecting. No, they're pretty enormous. Yeah,
that's a lot of people. Yeah, it's a contagious disease
and once somebody had it, there was really not anything
that could be done. Most treatments that people tried did
(03:49):
not have any real medical value. One was called the
red treatment, which was basically surrounding the patient with the
color red, but the patient did have to be clean,
fed and cared for until the scabs fell off, and
that was a few weeks after the pox started to form.
Smallpox was contagious that entire time, so it spread really
(04:10):
easily among families, caregivers, and other people who were living
in close quarters, and the people that survived having smallpox
often had extensive and disfiguring scarring. There were actually etiquette
manuals that offered advice on how to word a condolence
letter to your friend after her lovely face had been
horribly disfigured and scarred by smallpox. Many survivors also faced
(04:33):
other complications, including blindness, and before it's eradication, smallpox actually
caused more blindness than any other condition. So this disease
killed royalty, It changed lines of succession, It struck down
armies in the field, and shifted the tide of battle.
An epidemic near the end of the Roman Empire killed
almost seven million people, and when it was introduced into
(04:56):
the America's It devastated the native population, and it is
also spread to native people's on purpose as a form
of germ warfare during the French and Indian War. It
was so influential and terrifying that many polytheistic religions have
gods of smallpox, and there are Christian saints and martyrs
associated with it and its victims as well. So smallpox
(05:18):
was a disease deeply dreaded and feared, and it did
not mess around. But one man gets the credit thankfully
changed all of this, and that was Edward Jenner, and
he's the topic of most of this podcast. Yeah, but
before we talk about him, we kind of need to
talk about like the state of the world before he
(05:39):
came along. We've talked a little bit about the germ
theory of disease and how it did not really start
to spread around the United States and Europe until the
eighteen hundreds. But people weren't completely clueless about ideas like
contagiousness and immunity before this point. People knew that if
you were around someone who had smallpox for a long time,
you would probably get it too. And for more than
(06:00):
two thousand years, people have also known that a person
who had survived smallpox wasn't likely to get it again,
so smallpox survivors were tapped often to care for the
sick because they appeared to be protected. So it's not
really a far jump from those two ideas to the
thought that maybe you could give somebody smallpox on purpose
(06:21):
so that they would be immune later, sort of how
Like pre vaccine, sometimes parents would send their kids to
play with somebody who had chicken pox to get it
over with. I guess there are probably parents who don't
want to immunize their children who still do this, but
it would take a lot more efforts since chicken box
is a lot more rare now. Yeah, And that was
often done, especially with young children, because allegedly, if you
(06:42):
get chicken pox younger less horrible than if you get
it older. Getting chicken pox as an adult can be
extremely horribly painful, which is why I have had a vaccine.
So the thing is that for the most part, this
whole method of um of exposing somebody to smallpox on
purpose actually a whole lot grosser than chicken pox parties.
(07:05):
Oh yeah. The earliest attempts to deal with this happened
in China at least a thousand years ago, and in
six seventy traders introduced the practice to the Ottoman Empire,
where it started to progress to other nations. Sometimes it
was as simple as deliberately exposing yourself to someone with
a relatively mild case of the disease, but a more
(07:29):
direct method and also the grocer one, was to use
a needle or a lancet to extract matter from an
infected person smallpox lesions and put it under the skin
of a healthy person. Sometimes the material would be dried
out or stored at room temperature for a while so
it wasn't as lethal as fresh material. And another method
(07:49):
was to inhale dried material from a smallpox lesion or
a crushed up smallpox gab. Yeah, I know this sounds
just terrible. It's is like the sort of thing that
we would hear about on saw bones that we keep
mentioning is is like a thing that's just a terrible idea,
but that actually worked. Yeah. After this exposure, the healthy
(08:09):
person would usually wind up with a case of smallpox
that was less severe than if it had been caught naturally.
So you can see where there would be a certain
appeal to this concept like I will at least control
my exposure and hopefully get a mild version rather than
just cross my fingers and wait for the really horrible
yeah case of smallpox, to wait for disfigurement, blindness, and death.
(08:30):
This practice became known as both inoculation and vary elation.
So inoculation is from a Latin word meaning to graft
or to implant, so think of like grafting a bud
from one tree to another. Vary Elation comes from variola,
which is the name for the virus that causes smallpox,
and then bariola comes from Latin words meaning spots or pimples.
(08:53):
And the practice of variolation spread first through India, China,
and Africa, and by the eighteenth century it had made
its way to your up as well. It was slow
to catch on though, uh In the early eighteenth century,
Edward Wortley Montague was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and
while he was there, his wife, Lady Mary Worley Montague,
whose face had been scarred from her own bout of smallpox,
(09:15):
learned about variolation. But in seventeen eighteen she ordered the
embassy surgeon to perform variolation on her son. This procedure
was successful and she had her daughter inoculated in seventeen
twenty one. After they got back to London. The medical
community in England was not too sure about all this,
so naturally the next people who are very elated were prisoners.
(09:39):
We have discussed in previous podcasts that there are times
when people say it's not so much risk to use
a prisoner or a criminal, let's just put them at risk. Yeah,
there there are many ethical considerations in the history of
small box but from the air and some successful experimentation,
the practice spread through the English aristocracy and into the
(10:00):
of Europe. Vary elation made its way to the America's
shortly thereafter. Reverend Cotton Mather and doctor Zabdiel Boylston used
it to try to curb a smallpox epidemic in Boston
in sevente About half of Boston's population got the UH
got the virus. During this outbreak. About fourteen percent of
(10:23):
those who got it naturally died, and that compared to
two percent of the people who had been very elated.
So Mather and Boylston documented all of their progress and
with these results that showed that it was overall of success.
You know, varry relating people was way less deadly than
getting smallpox. Naturally, the practice started to become more common
(10:44):
on both sides of the Atlantic, and vary elation worked,
but it was not foolproof. People still died, as we
just mentioned, and survivors uh still had scars after they recovered.
Sometimes a very elated patient would spread smallpox to other people,
accidentally causing an outbreak anyway, and other diseases like syphilis, hepatitis,
(11:06):
and scrawpula, which is usually caused by the same bacterium
that causes tuberculosis, could also be transmitted during this very
elation process. Overall, varilation was about eighty percent effective and
it had a two percent mortality rate, so it was
better than getting smallpox the normal way, but there was
still a lot of room for improvement, and that leads
(11:28):
us to Edward Jenner. He was born on May seventeen,
seventeen forty nine, in Barkley, Gloucestershire. He was the eighth
of nine children, and he went to live with his
brother after being orphaned at the age of five. In
seventeen fifty seven, when he was eight years old, he
was inoculated for smallpox He started an apprenticeship when he
was in his early teens, working with a surgeon and
(11:49):
apothecary named Daniel Ludlow. He was Lidlow's apprentice for several years,
and as the story goes, it was while there that
he heard a dairymaid say that she would never get
small box because she had had cow pox. Cow Pox,
like smallpox, is a virus. Cows get it and it
causes them to get these sores on their utters. People
who came in contact with these sores while they were
(12:11):
milking could get cow pox from the cow, and it
would cause similar sores on their hands and lower arms.
This was normally a really mild disease, and the idea
that someone who had had cow pox before would not
also get smallpox was either conventional wisdom or country superstition,
depending on who you asked. And in addition to all that,
(12:32):
milkmaids were reputed to have extremely beautiful complexions. They are
the subjects of poems because of their lovely skin, presumably
because none of them had smallpox. Cars Jenner continued to
study medicine and surgery for the next several years, apprenticing
with George Hardwick in seventeen sixty four and with John
Hunter at St. George's Hospital in London after he turned
(12:53):
twenty one. And in addition to his interest in medicine,
uh Jenner was also adept at other areas of science.
He studied and observed animals, he collected fossils, and he
helped classify newly documented specimens. He also something of a
renaissance man, liked to play the violin and write poems.
And as we have in a practice we have alluded
(13:13):
to previously in a recent episode, he was a balloonist,
and he built and flew his own hydrogen balloon. Ballooning
was all the rage at this point, uh And in
sev he decided to try and experiment, building off the
idea that cow pox granted immunity from smallpox. What if,
as with vary elation, you could deliberately give someone cow pox.
(13:35):
So a dairy maid named Sarah Elms came to see
Jenner about the sore that she had on her hand,
and he examined her, said it looked like cow pox,
and she confirmed that one of the cows that she
milked had recently had cow pox, and the cow that
gave Sarah smallpox was named Blossom. Blossom skin is actually
(13:56):
on display in the University of London Library at St
George's Hospital. It was removed for restoration in and replaced
in August. Uh She was a Gloucester cow, which has
horns in both the males and the females, which is
why if you see the pictures of the skin, it
has horns on it, which some people who are not
used to seeing female cows with horns maybe confusing. Yeah,
(14:20):
I think it's kind of darling that her name was Blossom,
and a little morbid that our skin is still on
display in a museum. It's such a wonderfully morbid thing.
So Jenner extracted material from this sword and he used
(14:42):
it to inoculate an eight year old boy named James Phipps,
and he was the son of Jenner's gardener. So what
he did was he scratched James's arm and he rubbed
the material from Sarah's sore into it. James went through
a range of mild flu like symptoms and then he recovered.
A couple of months later, Jenner inoculated James again, this
(15:03):
time with fresh material from a smallpox sore. When James
didn't get smallpox. Jenner concluded that his experiment was in
fact a success. He decided to call his method vaccination,
from the Latin words for cow and cow pox. So
before we talk about how this wound up radically changing
the world, we would be remiss if we didn't talk
about some of the other people who had come to
(15:25):
the same conclusion at about the same time. Twenty two
years earlier, an affluent tenant farmer named Benjamin Jesti had
performed this same basic procedure on his wife and his
two sons during a smallpox outbreak in their area. He
had gotten the idea because he and two of his
milk maids had all had cow pox before, and neither
none of them had ever gotten smallpox in spite of
(15:46):
being exposed to it repeatedly. Jest took his wife and
two children to a field where some cows were infected
with cow pox, and he used a stalking needle to
transfer some material from the cow sores to their arms
his wife are. His wife's arm became infected and she
almost lost it, but all three of his family members
(16:06):
came through the outbreak without being infected. His sons were
inoculated with smallpox later on and had no reaction, and
they were all exposed to smallpox multiple times afterwards got
it despite the arm infection. It was a successful, though
unsettling operation. Yes, and Jesty was the target of all
(16:26):
kinds of derision and scorn in his community because of
what he had done, and while word did spread of
his actions in the local medical community, there's no written
evidence that Jenner ever heard about it. A schoolmaster named
Peter Plett also put cowpox to similar use in Holstein, Germany,
in using material from a cow on his employers two daughters.
(16:49):
They were the only children to survive an epidemic that
struck three years later, but one of them also had
a strong enough reaction when he did this experiment that
he didn't go further with the idea. A third man,
John Fuster, was a very elation practitioner, and in seventeen
sixty three he very related two brothers, and one of them,
who turned out to have had cow pox before, didn't
(17:11):
have any reaction, So his brother got smallpox in a
mild form, but nothing happened to him. So consequently Fuster
wondered if cow pox might prevent smallpox, and he wrote
a paper on the idea that he never published. He
made some attempts at inoculating people with cow pox at
roughly the same time as Jenner made his first attempts,
(17:33):
although it's really unclear as to whether he and Jenner,
who did know each other, ever talked about it. So
then we sort of get to the question of what
separates Jenner from these men and what earned him the
nickname of Father of immunology, And it's that he made
vaccination his life's work. Yeah, there have been several articles
that have come out in the last ten or fifteen
(17:54):
years that are sort of like, Jenner doesn't deserve this title.
So and So did it twenty years before he did.
And while it is true that he wasn't the first
person ever in history to try this thing, he absolutely
devoted himself to trying to uh to protect as many
people as possible from smallpox using cow pox from this
(18:14):
point on, so much so that his other medical practice
actually started to suffer. The first thing that he did
was that he submitted a paper to the Royal Society
in but it was rejected and he got a note
from the society's president that he really should be concerned
about his reputation so taking that into consideration, he repeated
(18:35):
his experiment a few times, and then he wrote up
an inquiry into the causes and effects of the very
La vaccinate, a disease discovered in some of the western
counties of England, particularly Gloucestershire, and known by the name
of cow pox, which is a lengthy title for a paper.
I love the lengthy paper titles. You can read this
one online for free. Yeah, And that paper detailed his
(18:56):
theories about the origins of cow pox. He thought it
came from a horse ailment which is casually called Greece,
which was later disproved, and he listed a number of
case studies involving cow pox and smallpox immunity. He published
this paper, financing it himself the next year. So the
response to his publication and his ongoing vaccination work was
(19:17):
mixed at best. People were really reluctant to believe that
what he was proposing could work. Cow Pox was also
not a really prevalent illness, especially in towns and cities,
which made it kind of hard to get the material
people needed to make vaccinations. Uh. One of the things
about vary elation was that there was smallpox everywhere. You
could easily get smallpox to inoculate other people with. Not
(19:40):
so much so with cow pox, because precautions like hand
washing and sterilization we're not being used yet. Sometimes cow
pox vaccines would become adulterated with smallpox through cross contamination
that would make it look like a person had gotten
smallpox from their cow pox vaccine. And people who made
mo the off of variolation who were super opposed to
(20:03):
Jenner's idea, as you can imagine, that would be a
natural response. People also objected to vaccination on religious grounds
or because they believe that cows were lesser than humans
and so that humans should not be contaminated with material
from cows. Clergy would speak against the idea of quote
contaminating humans with a substance from a sick animal. The
(20:25):
Anti Vaccine Society published a satirical cartoon called the cow
poc or The Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation, And
this was a drawing of a group of people all
being vaccinated and they were all growing cow heads out
of their bodies. This was drawn by British satirist James Gilray.
A year after Jenner had published his pamphlet, he conducted
(20:46):
a survey to try to conclusively prove that cow pox
did in fact confer smallpox immunity. Only once that was done,
with the answer being a pretty decisive yes, it does
in fact confer smallpox immunity, did vaccination gradually begin to
gain acceptance. And we're going to talk about how this
changed the world in a minute, But first we're gonna
talk about Jenner's personal life before we get to that point.
(21:09):
So it's a lot of what really was successful happened
after he died in seventeen eighty eight. He got married
and he eventually had four children. He built a cottage
in the garden where he would give free vaccinations to
poor children, and he called this the Temple of Vaccinia.
Jenner would give vaccine to anybody who asked him for
it for free, so the actual vaccination work was carried
(21:31):
out by many other people. He started to call himself
the vaccine Clerk to the world, and he developed new
ways to collect and preserve cowpox material for the vaccines.
Jenner put so much effort into vaccination that his own
medical practice, as Tracy mentioned earlier, really started to fail.
Around the start of the nineteenth century. Jenner gradually started
(21:52):
to pull away from public life. His work had drawn
huge praise, but it had also gotten a whole lot
of judgment and school worn from people who feared what
he was doing or questioned his practices. He received quite
a number of awards and honors for his work, including
several honorary degrees, and he received a medal from Napoleon
(22:13):
in eighteen o four, and Napoleon so respected him that
he was able to negotiate the release of British prisoners
of war during the Napoleonic Wars. Statues have been erected
in Jenner's honor all over the world. Parliament granted Jenner
ten thousand pounds in eighteen o two for his vaccination work,
and that was followed by another twenty thousand pounds five
(22:34):
years later, and this is millions of today's dollars. Vaccination
gradually started to overtake variolation in popularity, and in eighteen
forty England prohibited variolation outright, since vaccination was had at
this point proved to be much safer, and this sparked
protests from people who objected to vaccination for one reason
(22:55):
or another and wanted to have variolation available as a
choice Tryically, although Jenner did so much work to stop
the spread of smallpox, at the time, tuberculosis was still
a very common and deadly illness, and it also was
not particularly treatable. He lost his oldest son to tuberculosis
in eighteen ten and his wife in eighteen fifteen, and
(23:17):
he had other deaths in his family in the intervening years.
Edward Jenner did not, as was his custom, come down
for breakfast on January eighteen three, and he was found
in his room having had a massive stroke. He died
shortly thereafter, on January of eight So now let's get
(23:44):
back to how really the groundwork that Edward Jenner laid
actually changed the world. Yeah, as we mentioned before, although
other people had made the same discovery that Jenner did,
and even earlier than he had, it was still Jenner's
tireless work that really started the world on a path
to eradicating smallpox. It is, at least as of when
(24:08):
we are recording this, the only disease that mankind has
eradicated from the planet. Uh currently, the only samples of
it that remain are in laboratories. Vaccination was pretty prevalent
in Europe by eighteen hundred in eighteen oh three and
really just one of my favorite stories that maybe we
will do a whole episode on later. Francisco Xavier to Balmas,
(24:29):
acting on behalf of King Charles the Fourth, started an
expedition from Spain to South America via the Canary Islands,
and the goal of this expedition was to deliver vaccine
to South America and Asia. So at this point, the
preservation methods that were used to uh to make the
vaccine just they couldn't keep it potent over such a
(24:50):
long and hot voyage. So they had to come up
with a different method, which was that they rounded up
twenty two orphans who had never had cowpox or small
box and used them as a chain of human carriers
to allow the vaccine to reach the Caribbean. There are
many ethical implication implications of this process, simultaneously ingenious and
(25:12):
the little spine chilling. Yeah. So basically they would, you know,
infect one person before the voyage started and then pass
it from person to person as they crossed the sea.
So so many moral layers to what we were talking about.
I cannot even scratch the surface of it with my
my pitiful moral attempts. But In eighteen o seven, Bavarians
(25:37):
became the first to require military recruits to be vaccinated
for smallpox, since troop movements had always been a major
factor in the spread of the disease. In eighteen fifty three,
England made smallpox vaccination compulsory. Other nations followed suit, and
the rate of smallpox infection really dramatically started to drop.
Resistance to vaccines continued to grow as more nation began
(26:00):
to require it. Nobel Prize winning writer George Bernard Shaw,
who caught smallpox in eighty one in spite of having
been vaccinated as a baby, called vaccination quote a peculiarly
filthy piece of witchcraft. Jenner had thought the protection granted
by childhood vaccination would last forever, but that turned out
to not be the case. And really there were some real,
(26:22):
verifiable problems with the earliest vaccines because of the state
of medical knowledge at the time. They simply were not
being made or given in a way that was sterile
or safe. There was no quality control, there was no
method of standardizing how much of the virus a person
got with any given vaccination. Plus, the first vaccinations were
often as the case was with the orphans who were
(26:45):
crossing the notion they were made from arm to arm,
from person to person, and that would spread disease from
the first person or wherever on down the line. It
wasn't until the eighteen forties that people started instead passing
the infection from cows to cows and then mass producing
the vaccine from cow material only, which did cut down
on some of the related blood borne infections that could
(27:08):
be passed along. And unfortunately, Jenner's record also was not perfect.
Some of his conclusions, including the connection to the grease
disease and horses and the idea that immunity was permanent,
proved to be false during his lifetime. He had also
written a study on the behavior of newly hatched cuckoo
birds that was correct, but wasn't proved to be so
(27:28):
until many years later. So people disbelieved his conclusions and
used that as another strike against him. Basically, he said,
you were wrong about this, and it was to just
kind of their argument. Father. It wasn't even just that
he was wrong. What he had what he had proven
was basically that that newly hatched cuckoo's will throw the
other eggs and the other hatchlings out of the nest
(27:51):
and everybody thought they were not physically capable of doing that.
And so it was not only that they were like
you're wrong, Like you're wrong, and that's ridiculous, but in fact,
gooser jerks, cuckoos are jerks, and they do that for real,
and he had watched them do it with his own eyes. Yeah.
But basically anything that he said or published that turned
out to be wrong or was believed to be wrong
(28:11):
and not proven until later really became fuel for the
anti vaccination fire. Another big log on that fire was
that although he had many years of medical training, he
hadn't passed any kind of comprehensive medical exam when he
started doing his immunization work. Those weren't compulsory when he
went through his training, and the fact that he hadn't
passed the equivalent of the boards became this huge bone
(28:34):
of contention, and some people just thought the vaccination wasn't necessary.
They claimed that the rate of smallpox decline was really
just because of improvements in general sanitation and hygiene. As
the rate dropped, which meant that people felt less threatened
by smallpox on a day to day basis, objection to
vaccination became more and more vehement. Patent medicine pushers and
(28:57):
other clacks also started to deliberately spread anti vaccine sentiments
as those practices started to grow in the eighteen hundreds.
And there are some legitimate ethical issues that surround vaccination,
you know, some of which we've talked about before earlier
in this podcast. Compulsory vaccination was viewed as wealthy people
invading the privacy of poorer people and robbing of them
(29:19):
of their freedom of choice. And some nations there were
layers and layers and layers of entangled religious and ethical considerations.
In India, for example, there was the fact that the
vaccine came from cows, which was symbolically sacred to many Hindus.
The vaccine was also being passed from person to person
through a society that had a really rigid cast system,
(29:42):
and the whole thing was wrapped up under this umbrella
of British colonialism. So as with the chain of human
orphan carriers, that's a whole lot of moral and ethical
discussion to try to unpack. Yeah, it's really problematic, and
regardless of all of these considerations, the end result was
the only time ever in human history that a contagious
(30:03):
disease had been eradicated through the efforts of human beings,
so that almost adds another like dicey layer of people
being able to say, well, the end justifies the means.
But then there was also some mythical weirdness along the way. Right,
it becomes a really complicated issue. Smallpox was eradicated in
most of Europe and North America by the nineteen fifties,
(30:23):
but it was still really prevalent in many other parts
of the world at that point. In nineteen sixty seven,
the World Health Organizations spearheaded a global vaccination effort, which
was met with a lot of skepticism. The vaccine and
use at this point was freeze dried. It was generally
made from animal lymph, and it was made too much,
much much higher standards of quality control and purity and
(30:47):
sanitation and everything else than what was around in Jenner's time.
We were not just extracting material from sores and sticking
it into people anymore, which is still so the grossest
thing usually the wiggles uh. In some regions, the goal
was to vaccinate everyone, but when that wasn't possible, they
turned to a method that was known as ring vaccination,
(31:09):
since smallpox spreads through close contact rather than casual contacts,
so you'd get it from living in the same house
with someone, but not from walking past an infected person
on the street. Uh. The focus was on vaccinating people
who came into close contact with someone who had been exposed.
So getting a vaccine within three days of exposure dramatically
decreases the likelihood of getting smallpox, or it enables you
(31:33):
to only get a very light case of it. Yeah,
So when there would be a reported case of smallpox,
they would sort of come and immunize everyone around that
person and cut off this one infection vector, uh from
spreading it to other people. Had there been multiple stable
strains of smallpox, which there weren't, just really just one
main one, or if it had also been carried by animals,
(31:57):
this whole eradication attempt would have been a lot more
difficult than it was. And The last occurrence of the
most serious form of smallpox, known as very ala major,
was in Bangladesh in nineteen seventy five. The last naturally
occurring case of smallpox was in Somalia in nineteen seventy seven,
and on May eighth of nineteen eighty the World Health
(32:19):
Organization declared that the world was now free of smallpox.
Like we said, first and only time ever for that
to happen. Yeah, there have been some diseases that have
kind of faded from history thanks to changes in diet
and sanitation and that kind of thing. So there are
diseases that used to be common that really aren't anymore.
But this is really the only time that people have
(32:39):
said we are going to get rid of this disease
and then did it. There there are some others that
are getting kind of close to that point now, but
as of right now, um, which is October, smallpox is
the only one, although it's been eradicated and you know,
you cannot generally get it from another person unless that
person has been infected in some kind of lab accident.
(33:01):
There are many nations that maintain a stockpile of smallpox
vaccine in case of a biological weapon attack using smallpox.
Right now, the only known smallpox virus samples still in
existence are in laboratories in the United States and Russia,
and every once in a while, uh, everybody involved kind
of ree visits the idea about whether we should destroy
(33:22):
those and the most recent conversations I've seen about it
are from twenty eleven. Um that like there had been. Yes,
we are destroying them as far back as in the eighties,
but they're still around. Um and the most recent conversations
about it. The recommendation is, you know, there might actually
be a need for us to have intact uh samples
(33:43):
of the original virus if there were something like a
terror attacked using smallpox. So that remains to be discussed
for a long time. I think yeah, probably underlock and key. Uh.
And the home that Jenner had is today known as
the Edward Jenner Museum. You can visit it. You can
visit it and see the Temple of Vaccinia. I just
(34:05):
love they called it that. I do. It's sort of cute.
So yes, uh. We we got some questions about vaccination
after we talked about Elsa Lanchester and her mother not
wanting her to be vaccinated. Yeah, and that kind of
led me to what how did how did I knew
the basic story was about Jenner and counts Now I
know a lot more of it and how super gross
(34:27):
it was. We could have been way more graphic in
our language in this episode, and we mostly have not
been because I don't think I could stomach it. Yeah,
we're not trying to be gentle with you, We're trying
to be gentle with us. Yes, I could probably stomach it.
But thank you so much for joining us for this
(34:50):
Saturday classic. Since this is out of the archive, if
you heard an email address or a Facebook U r
L or something similar during the course of the show,
that maybe absolete. Now, so here's our current contact information.
We are at History Podcasts, at how stuff works dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History. All over
social media. That is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest,
(35:13):
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
dot com.
Happy Saturday. Today's classic is brought to you by a
tidbit of information that I stumbled across completely at random
while doing research on something else. Entirely. It's about Edward Jenner,
known as the father of immunology thanks to his lifetime
spent working with smallpox vaccines. And we mentioned the work
of the Reverend Cotton, Mother and Dr Zabdiel Boylston in
(00:25):
combating a smallpox outbreak in Boston in one using a
technique called variolation. But what we don't say what Tracy
just learned was it Mother first heard about this practice
from one Seamus, an enslaved man Mother's congregation had bought
for him. Only Semis told Mother about vary elation and
(00:45):
that it was commonly used among Africans. So it seemed
like a good time to re share that old episode
with this new to us tidbit. Will link to an
article from the Hutchins Center for African and African American
Research at Harvard with more and remation about on a Semis.
One last note, we actually say in this show that
smallpox is the only disease that's been eradicated thanks to
(01:08):
humanity's effort. But we learned afterwards that render pest is
another formally declared eradicated in about two years before this
podcast originally came out, so keep that in mind as
you listen. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class
from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
(01:37):
the podcast. I am Tracy Wilson when I'm Polly Fried.
Today we're going to talk about smallpox, super fun topics. Well,
and it's been uh pretty much gone for long enough
that I think most people don't really have a sense
of just what it was like. Like, I think the
closest equivalent most people have today's chicken pox. But even
(01:58):
if that doesn't touch it into of horrifying this No,
even now that we have chicken pox vaccine, a lot
of people have never experienced chicken pox. And I coincidentally
never got chicken pox. What I had to be vaccinated
for it as an a grown up because I never
got it as a child, neither did my brother. So smallpox,
it's not like super chicken pox. It's been around for
(02:20):
longer than recorded history, and it probably originated in Africa
more than ten thousand years ago, and it spread around
the world following migration and trade. We have physical evidence
that it existed as far back as six b C,
thanks to the mummified head of Ramsey's the Fifth which
has evidence of smallpox physically. It was also described in
(02:45):
writing in China and India at about the same time.
But based on all that knowledge, it's pretty clear that
smallpox existed before writing did. Yeah, and there are several
types of smallpox, and there are there's a range of
possible complications that can come from it, but in general, uh,
it causes these small, pus filled lesions on the skin,
(03:07):
and people that have it also get a fever normally
and other flu like symptoms. And when it existed in
the wild, it was fatal and roughly of all cases
for babies, that number was between eight and so a
really high mortality rate. And in the eighteenth century, as
much as ten percent of the population of Europe died
(03:29):
of smallpox every year, and more than three million people
died of smallpox during the twentieth century. Those are numbers
that I bet people were not expecting. No, they're pretty enormous. Yeah,
that's a lot of people. Yeah, it's a contagious disease
and once somebody had it, there was really not anything
that could be done. Most treatments that people tried did
(03:49):
not have any real medical value. One was called the
red treatment, which was basically surrounding the patient with the
color red, but the patient did have to be clean,
fed and cared for until the scabs fell off, and
that was a few weeks after the pox started to form.
Smallpox was contagious that entire time, so it spread really
(04:10):
easily among families, caregivers, and other people who were living
in close quarters, and the people that survived having smallpox
often had extensive and disfiguring scarring. There were actually etiquette
manuals that offered advice on how to word a condolence
letter to your friend after her lovely face had been
horribly disfigured and scarred by smallpox. Many survivors also faced
(04:33):
other complications, including blindness, and before it's eradication, smallpox actually
caused more blindness than any other condition. So this disease
killed royalty, It changed lines of succession, It struck down
armies in the field, and shifted the tide of battle.
An epidemic near the end of the Roman Empire killed
almost seven million people, and when it was introduced into
(04:56):
the America's It devastated the native population, and it is
also spread to native people's on purpose as a form
of germ warfare during the French and Indian War. It
was so influential and terrifying that many polytheistic religions have
gods of smallpox, and there are Christian saints and martyrs
associated with it and its victims as well. So smallpox
(05:18):
was a disease deeply dreaded and feared, and it did
not mess around. But one man gets the credit thankfully
changed all of this, and that was Edward Jenner, and
he's the topic of most of this podcast. Yeah, but
before we talk about him, we kind of need to
talk about like the state of the world before he
(05:39):
came along. We've talked a little bit about the germ
theory of disease and how it did not really start
to spread around the United States and Europe until the
eighteen hundreds. But people weren't completely clueless about ideas like
contagiousness and immunity before this point. People knew that if
you were around someone who had smallpox for a long time,
you would probably get it too. And for more than
(06:00):
two thousand years, people have also known that a person
who had survived smallpox wasn't likely to get it again,
so smallpox survivors were tapped often to care for the
sick because they appeared to be protected. So it's not
really a far jump from those two ideas to the
thought that maybe you could give somebody smallpox on purpose
(06:21):
so that they would be immune later, sort of how
Like pre vaccine, sometimes parents would send their kids to
play with somebody who had chicken pox to get it
over with. I guess there are probably parents who don't
want to immunize their children who still do this, but
it would take a lot more efforts since chicken box
is a lot more rare now. Yeah, And that was
often done, especially with young children, because allegedly, if you
(06:42):
get chicken pox younger less horrible than if you get
it older. Getting chicken pox as an adult can be
extremely horribly painful, which is why I have had a vaccine.
So the thing is that for the most part, this
whole method of um of exposing somebody to smallpox on
purpose actually a whole lot grosser than chicken pox parties.
(07:05):
Oh yeah. The earliest attempts to deal with this happened
in China at least a thousand years ago, and in
six seventy traders introduced the practice to the Ottoman Empire,
where it started to progress to other nations. Sometimes it
was as simple as deliberately exposing yourself to someone with
a relatively mild case of the disease, but a more
(07:29):
direct method and also the grocer one, was to use
a needle or a lancet to extract matter from an
infected person smallpox lesions and put it under the skin
of a healthy person. Sometimes the material would be dried
out or stored at room temperature for a while so
it wasn't as lethal as fresh material. And another method
(07:49):
was to inhale dried material from a smallpox lesion or
a crushed up smallpox gab. Yeah, I know this sounds
just terrible. It's is like the sort of thing that
we would hear about on saw bones that we keep
mentioning is is like a thing that's just a terrible idea,
but that actually worked. Yeah. After this exposure, the healthy
(08:09):
person would usually wind up with a case of smallpox
that was less severe than if it had been caught naturally.
So you can see where there would be a certain
appeal to this concept like I will at least control
my exposure and hopefully get a mild version rather than
just cross my fingers and wait for the really horrible
yeah case of smallpox, to wait for disfigurement, blindness, and death.
(08:30):
This practice became known as both inoculation and vary elation.
So inoculation is from a Latin word meaning to graft
or to implant, so think of like grafting a bud
from one tree to another. Vary Elation comes from variola,
which is the name for the virus that causes smallpox,
and then bariola comes from Latin words meaning spots or pimples.
(08:53):
And the practice of variolation spread first through India, China,
and Africa, and by the eighteenth century it had made
its way to your up as well. It was slow
to catch on though, uh In the early eighteenth century,
Edward Wortley Montague was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and
while he was there, his wife, Lady Mary Worley Montague,
whose face had been scarred from her own bout of smallpox,
(09:15):
learned about variolation. But in seventeen eighteen she ordered the
embassy surgeon to perform variolation on her son. This procedure
was successful and she had her daughter inoculated in seventeen
twenty one. After they got back to London. The medical
community in England was not too sure about all this,
so naturally the next people who are very elated were prisoners.
(09:39):
We have discussed in previous podcasts that there are times
when people say it's not so much risk to use
a prisoner or a criminal, let's just put them at risk. Yeah,
there there are many ethical considerations in the history of
small box but from the air and some successful experimentation,
the practice spread through the English aristocracy and into the
(10:00):
of Europe. Vary elation made its way to the America's
shortly thereafter. Reverend Cotton Mather and doctor Zabdiel Boylston used
it to try to curb a smallpox epidemic in Boston
in sevente About half of Boston's population got the UH
got the virus. During this outbreak. About fourteen percent of
(10:23):
those who got it naturally died, and that compared to
two percent of the people who had been very elated.
So Mather and Boylston documented all of their progress and
with these results that showed that it was overall of success.
You know, varry relating people was way less deadly than
getting smallpox. Naturally, the practice started to become more common
(10:44):
on both sides of the Atlantic, and vary elation worked,
but it was not foolproof. People still died, as we
just mentioned, and survivors uh still had scars after they recovered.
Sometimes a very elated patient would spread smallpox to other people,
accidentally causing an outbreak anyway, and other diseases like syphilis, hepatitis,
(11:06):
and scrawpula, which is usually caused by the same bacterium
that causes tuberculosis, could also be transmitted during this very
elation process. Overall, varilation was about eighty percent effective and
it had a two percent mortality rate, so it was
better than getting smallpox the normal way, but there was
still a lot of room for improvement, and that leads
(11:28):
us to Edward Jenner. He was born on May seventeen,
seventeen forty nine, in Barkley, Gloucestershire. He was the eighth
of nine children, and he went to live with his
brother after being orphaned at the age of five. In
seventeen fifty seven, when he was eight years old, he
was inoculated for smallpox He started an apprenticeship when he
was in his early teens, working with a surgeon and
(11:49):
apothecary named Daniel Ludlow. He was Lidlow's apprentice for several years,
and as the story goes, it was while there that
he heard a dairymaid say that she would never get
small box because she had had cow pox. Cow Pox,
like smallpox, is a virus. Cows get it and it
causes them to get these sores on their utters. People
who came in contact with these sores while they were
(12:11):
milking could get cow pox from the cow, and it
would cause similar sores on their hands and lower arms.
This was normally a really mild disease, and the idea
that someone who had had cow pox before would not
also get smallpox was either conventional wisdom or country superstition,
depending on who you asked. And in addition to all that,
(12:32):
milkmaids were reputed to have extremely beautiful complexions. They are
the subjects of poems because of their lovely skin, presumably
because none of them had smallpox. Cars Jenner continued to
study medicine and surgery for the next several years, apprenticing
with George Hardwick in seventeen sixty four and with John
Hunter at St. George's Hospital in London after he turned
(12:53):
twenty one. And in addition to his interest in medicine,
uh Jenner was also adept at other areas of science.
He studied and observed animals, he collected fossils, and he
helped classify newly documented specimens. He also something of a
renaissance man, liked to play the violin and write poems.
And as we have in a practice we have alluded
(13:13):
to previously in a recent episode, he was a balloonist,
and he built and flew his own hydrogen balloon. Ballooning
was all the rage at this point, uh And in
sev he decided to try and experiment, building off the
idea that cow pox granted immunity from smallpox. What if,
as with vary elation, you could deliberately give someone cow pox.
(13:35):
So a dairy maid named Sarah Elms came to see
Jenner about the sore that she had on her hand,
and he examined her, said it looked like cow pox,
and she confirmed that one of the cows that she
milked had recently had cow pox, and the cow that
gave Sarah smallpox was named Blossom. Blossom skin is actually
(13:56):
on display in the University of London Library at St
George's Hospital. It was removed for restoration in and replaced
in August. Uh She was a Gloucester cow, which has
horns in both the males and the females, which is
why if you see the pictures of the skin, it
has horns on it, which some people who are not
used to seeing female cows with horns maybe confusing. Yeah,
(14:20):
I think it's kind of darling that her name was Blossom,
and a little morbid that our skin is still on
display in a museum. It's such a wonderfully morbid thing.
So Jenner extracted material from this sword and he used
(14:42):
it to inoculate an eight year old boy named James Phipps,
and he was the son of Jenner's gardener. So what
he did was he scratched James's arm and he rubbed
the material from Sarah's sore into it. James went through
a range of mild flu like symptoms and then he recovered.
A couple of months later, Jenner inoculated James again, this
(15:03):
time with fresh material from a smallpox sore. When James
didn't get smallpox. Jenner concluded that his experiment was in
fact a success. He decided to call his method vaccination,
from the Latin words for cow and cow pox. So
before we talk about how this wound up radically changing
the world, we would be remiss if we didn't talk
about some of the other people who had come to
(15:25):
the same conclusion at about the same time. Twenty two
years earlier, an affluent tenant farmer named Benjamin Jesti had
performed this same basic procedure on his wife and his
two sons during a smallpox outbreak in their area. He
had gotten the idea because he and two of his
milk maids had all had cow pox before, and neither
none of them had ever gotten smallpox in spite of
(15:46):
being exposed to it repeatedly. Jest took his wife and
two children to a field where some cows were infected
with cow pox, and he used a stalking needle to
transfer some material from the cow sores to their arms
his wife are. His wife's arm became infected and she
almost lost it, but all three of his family members
(16:06):
came through the outbreak without being infected. His sons were
inoculated with smallpox later on and had no reaction, and
they were all exposed to smallpox multiple times afterwards got
it despite the arm infection. It was a successful, though
unsettling operation. Yes, and Jesty was the target of all
(16:26):
kinds of derision and scorn in his community because of
what he had done, and while word did spread of
his actions in the local medical community, there's no written
evidence that Jenner ever heard about it. A schoolmaster named
Peter Plett also put cowpox to similar use in Holstein, Germany,
in using material from a cow on his employers two daughters.
(16:49):
They were the only children to survive an epidemic that
struck three years later, but one of them also had
a strong enough reaction when he did this experiment that
he didn't go further with the idea. A third man,
John Fuster, was a very elation practitioner, and in seventeen
sixty three he very related two brothers, and one of them,
who turned out to have had cow pox before, didn't
(17:11):
have any reaction, So his brother got smallpox in a
mild form, but nothing happened to him. So consequently Fuster
wondered if cow pox might prevent smallpox, and he wrote
a paper on the idea that he never published. He
made some attempts at inoculating people with cow pox at
roughly the same time as Jenner made his first attempts,
(17:33):
although it's really unclear as to whether he and Jenner,
who did know each other, ever talked about it. So
then we sort of get to the question of what
separates Jenner from these men and what earned him the
nickname of Father of immunology, And it's that he made
vaccination his life's work. Yeah, there have been several articles
that have come out in the last ten or fifteen
(17:54):
years that are sort of like, Jenner doesn't deserve this title.
So and So did it twenty years before he did.
And while it is true that he wasn't the first
person ever in history to try this thing, he absolutely
devoted himself to trying to uh to protect as many
people as possible from smallpox using cow pox from this
(18:14):
point on, so much so that his other medical practice
actually started to suffer. The first thing that he did
was that he submitted a paper to the Royal Society
in but it was rejected and he got a note
from the society's president that he really should be concerned
about his reputation so taking that into consideration, he repeated
(18:35):
his experiment a few times, and then he wrote up
an inquiry into the causes and effects of the very
La vaccinate, a disease discovered in some of the western
counties of England, particularly Gloucestershire, and known by the name
of cow pox, which is a lengthy title for a paper.
I love the lengthy paper titles. You can read this
one online for free. Yeah, And that paper detailed his
(18:56):
theories about the origins of cow pox. He thought it
came from a horse ailment which is casually called Greece,
which was later disproved, and he listed a number of
case studies involving cow pox and smallpox immunity. He published
this paper, financing it himself the next year. So the
response to his publication and his ongoing vaccination work was
(19:17):
mixed at best. People were really reluctant to believe that
what he was proposing could work. Cow Pox was also
not a really prevalent illness, especially in towns and cities,
which made it kind of hard to get the material
people needed to make vaccinations. Uh. One of the things
about vary elation was that there was smallpox everywhere. You
could easily get smallpox to inoculate other people with. Not
(19:40):
so much so with cow pox, because precautions like hand
washing and sterilization we're not being used yet. Sometimes cow
pox vaccines would become adulterated with smallpox through cross contamination
that would make it look like a person had gotten
smallpox from their cow pox vaccine. And people who made
mo the off of variolation who were super opposed to
(20:03):
Jenner's idea, as you can imagine, that would be a
natural response. People also objected to vaccination on religious grounds
or because they believe that cows were lesser than humans
and so that humans should not be contaminated with material
from cows. Clergy would speak against the idea of quote
contaminating humans with a substance from a sick animal. The
(20:25):
Anti Vaccine Society published a satirical cartoon called the cow
poc or The Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation, And
this was a drawing of a group of people all
being vaccinated and they were all growing cow heads out
of their bodies. This was drawn by British satirist James Gilray.
A year after Jenner had published his pamphlet, he conducted
(20:46):
a survey to try to conclusively prove that cow pox
did in fact confer smallpox immunity. Only once that was done,
with the answer being a pretty decisive yes, it does
in fact confer smallpox immunity, did vaccination gradually begin to
gain acceptance. And we're going to talk about how this
changed the world in a minute, But first we're gonna
talk about Jenner's personal life before we get to that point.
(21:09):
So it's a lot of what really was successful happened
after he died in seventeen eighty eight. He got married
and he eventually had four children. He built a cottage
in the garden where he would give free vaccinations to
poor children, and he called this the Temple of Vaccinia.
Jenner would give vaccine to anybody who asked him for
it for free, so the actual vaccination work was carried
(21:31):
out by many other people. He started to call himself
the vaccine Clerk to the world, and he developed new
ways to collect and preserve cowpox material for the vaccines.
Jenner put so much effort into vaccination that his own
medical practice, as Tracy mentioned earlier, really started to fail.
Around the start of the nineteenth century. Jenner gradually started
(21:52):
to pull away from public life. His work had drawn
huge praise, but it had also gotten a whole lot
of judgment and school worn from people who feared what
he was doing or questioned his practices. He received quite
a number of awards and honors for his work, including
several honorary degrees, and he received a medal from Napoleon
(22:13):
in eighteen o four, and Napoleon so respected him that
he was able to negotiate the release of British prisoners
of war during the Napoleonic Wars. Statues have been erected
in Jenner's honor all over the world. Parliament granted Jenner
ten thousand pounds in eighteen o two for his vaccination work,
and that was followed by another twenty thousand pounds five
(22:34):
years later, and this is millions of today's dollars. Vaccination
gradually started to overtake variolation in popularity, and in eighteen
forty England prohibited variolation outright, since vaccination was had at
this point proved to be much safer, and this sparked
protests from people who objected to vaccination for one reason
(22:55):
or another and wanted to have variolation available as a
choice Tryically, although Jenner did so much work to stop
the spread of smallpox, at the time, tuberculosis was still
a very common and deadly illness, and it also was
not particularly treatable. He lost his oldest son to tuberculosis
in eighteen ten and his wife in eighteen fifteen, and
(23:17):
he had other deaths in his family in the intervening years.
Edward Jenner did not, as was his custom, come down
for breakfast on January eighteen three, and he was found
in his room having had a massive stroke. He died
shortly thereafter, on January of eight So now let's get
(23:44):
back to how really the groundwork that Edward Jenner laid
actually changed the world. Yeah, as we mentioned before, although
other people had made the same discovery that Jenner did,
and even earlier than he had, it was still Jenner's
tireless work that really started the world on a path
to eradicating smallpox. It is, at least as of when
(24:08):
we are recording this, the only disease that mankind has
eradicated from the planet. Uh currently, the only samples of
it that remain are in laboratories. Vaccination was pretty prevalent
in Europe by eighteen hundred in eighteen oh three and
really just one of my favorite stories that maybe we
will do a whole episode on later. Francisco Xavier to Balmas,
(24:29):
acting on behalf of King Charles the Fourth, started an
expedition from Spain to South America via the Canary Islands,
and the goal of this expedition was to deliver vaccine
to South America and Asia. So at this point, the
preservation methods that were used to uh to make the
vaccine just they couldn't keep it potent over such a
(24:50):
long and hot voyage. So they had to come up
with a different method, which was that they rounded up
twenty two orphans who had never had cowpox or small
box and used them as a chain of human carriers
to allow the vaccine to reach the Caribbean. There are
many ethical implication implications of this process, simultaneously ingenious and
(25:12):
the little spine chilling. Yeah. So basically they would, you know,
infect one person before the voyage started and then pass
it from person to person as they crossed the sea.
So so many moral layers to what we were talking about.
I cannot even scratch the surface of it with my
my pitiful moral attempts. But In eighteen o seven, Bavarians
(25:37):
became the first to require military recruits to be vaccinated
for smallpox, since troop movements had always been a major
factor in the spread of the disease. In eighteen fifty three,
England made smallpox vaccination compulsory. Other nations followed suit, and
the rate of smallpox infection really dramatically started to drop.
Resistance to vaccines continued to grow as more nation began
(26:00):
to require it. Nobel Prize winning writer George Bernard Shaw,
who caught smallpox in eighty one in spite of having
been vaccinated as a baby, called vaccination quote a peculiarly
filthy piece of witchcraft. Jenner had thought the protection granted
by childhood vaccination would last forever, but that turned out
to not be the case. And really there were some real,
(26:22):
verifiable problems with the earliest vaccines because of the state
of medical knowledge at the time. They simply were not
being made or given in a way that was sterile
or safe. There was no quality control, there was no
method of standardizing how much of the virus a person
got with any given vaccination. Plus, the first vaccinations were
often as the case was with the orphans who were
(26:45):
crossing the notion they were made from arm to arm,
from person to person, and that would spread disease from
the first person or wherever on down the line. It
wasn't until the eighteen forties that people started instead passing
the infection from cows to cows and then mass producing
the vaccine from cow material only, which did cut down
on some of the related blood borne infections that could
(27:08):
be passed along. And unfortunately, Jenner's record also was not perfect.
Some of his conclusions, including the connection to the grease
disease and horses and the idea that immunity was permanent,
proved to be false during his lifetime. He had also
written a study on the behavior of newly hatched cuckoo
birds that was correct, but wasn't proved to be so
(27:28):
until many years later. So people disbelieved his conclusions and
used that as another strike against him. Basically, he said,
you were wrong about this, and it was to just
kind of their argument. Father. It wasn't even just that
he was wrong. What he had what he had proven
was basically that that newly hatched cuckoo's will throw the
other eggs and the other hatchlings out of the nest
(27:51):
and everybody thought they were not physically capable of doing that.
And so it was not only that they were like
you're wrong, Like you're wrong, and that's ridiculous, but in fact,
gooser jerks, cuckoos are jerks, and they do that for real,
and he had watched them do it with his own eyes. Yeah.
But basically anything that he said or published that turned
out to be wrong or was believed to be wrong
(28:11):
and not proven until later really became fuel for the
anti vaccination fire. Another big log on that fire was
that although he had many years of medical training, he
hadn't passed any kind of comprehensive medical exam when he
started doing his immunization work. Those weren't compulsory when he
went through his training, and the fact that he hadn't
passed the equivalent of the boards became this huge bone
(28:34):
of contention, and some people just thought the vaccination wasn't necessary.
They claimed that the rate of smallpox decline was really
just because of improvements in general sanitation and hygiene. As
the rate dropped, which meant that people felt less threatened
by smallpox on a day to day basis, objection to
vaccination became more and more vehement. Patent medicine pushers and
(28:57):
other clacks also started to deliberately spread anti vaccine sentiments
as those practices started to grow in the eighteen hundreds.
And there are some legitimate ethical issues that surround vaccination,
you know, some of which we've talked about before earlier
in this podcast. Compulsory vaccination was viewed as wealthy people
invading the privacy of poorer people and robbing of them
(29:19):
of their freedom of choice. And some nations there were
layers and layers and layers of entangled religious and ethical considerations.
In India, for example, there was the fact that the
vaccine came from cows, which was symbolically sacred to many Hindus.
The vaccine was also being passed from person to person
through a society that had a really rigid cast system,
(29:42):
and the whole thing was wrapped up under this umbrella
of British colonialism. So as with the chain of human
orphan carriers, that's a whole lot of moral and ethical
discussion to try to unpack. Yeah, it's really problematic, and
regardless of all of these considerations, the end result was
the only time ever in human history that a contagious
(30:03):
disease had been eradicated through the efforts of human beings,
so that almost adds another like dicey layer of people
being able to say, well, the end justifies the means.
But then there was also some mythical weirdness along the way. Right,
it becomes a really complicated issue. Smallpox was eradicated in
most of Europe and North America by the nineteen fifties,
(30:23):
but it was still really prevalent in many other parts
of the world at that point. In nineteen sixty seven,
the World Health Organizations spearheaded a global vaccination effort, which
was met with a lot of skepticism. The vaccine and
use at this point was freeze dried. It was generally
made from animal lymph, and it was made too much,
much much higher standards of quality control and purity and
(30:47):
sanitation and everything else than what was around in Jenner's time.
We were not just extracting material from sores and sticking
it into people anymore, which is still so the grossest
thing usually the wiggles uh. In some regions, the goal
was to vaccinate everyone, but when that wasn't possible, they
turned to a method that was known as ring vaccination,
(31:09):
since smallpox spreads through close contact rather than casual contacts,
so you'd get it from living in the same house
with someone, but not from walking past an infected person
on the street. Uh. The focus was on vaccinating people
who came into close contact with someone who had been exposed.
So getting a vaccine within three days of exposure dramatically
decreases the likelihood of getting smallpox, or it enables you
(31:33):
to only get a very light case of it. Yeah,
So when there would be a reported case of smallpox,
they would sort of come and immunize everyone around that
person and cut off this one infection vector, uh from
spreading it to other people. Had there been multiple stable
strains of smallpox, which there weren't, just really just one
main one, or if it had also been carried by animals,
(31:57):
this whole eradication attempt would have been a lot more
difficult than it was. And The last occurrence of the
most serious form of smallpox, known as very ala major,
was in Bangladesh in nineteen seventy five. The last naturally
occurring case of smallpox was in Somalia in nineteen seventy seven,
and on May eighth of nineteen eighty the World Health
(32:19):
Organization declared that the world was now free of smallpox.
Like we said, first and only time ever for that
to happen. Yeah, there have been some diseases that have
kind of faded from history thanks to changes in diet
and sanitation and that kind of thing. So there are
diseases that used to be common that really aren't anymore.
But this is really the only time that people have
(32:39):
said we are going to get rid of this disease
and then did it. There there are some others that
are getting kind of close to that point now, but
as of right now, um, which is October, smallpox is
the only one, although it's been eradicated and you know,
you cannot generally get it from another person unless that
person has been infected in some kind of lab accident.
(33:01):
There are many nations that maintain a stockpile of smallpox
vaccine in case of a biological weapon attack using smallpox.
Right now, the only known smallpox virus samples still in
existence are in laboratories in the United States and Russia,
and every once in a while, uh, everybody involved kind
of ree visits the idea about whether we should destroy
(33:22):
those and the most recent conversations I've seen about it
are from twenty eleven. Um that like there had been. Yes,
we are destroying them as far back as in the eighties,
but they're still around. Um and the most recent conversations
about it. The recommendation is, you know, there might actually
be a need for us to have intact uh samples
(33:43):
of the original virus if there were something like a
terror attacked using smallpox. So that remains to be discussed
for a long time. I think yeah, probably underlock and key. Uh.
And the home that Jenner had is today known as
the Edward Jenner Museum. You can visit it. You can
visit it and see the Temple of Vaccinia. I just
(34:05):
love they called it that. I do. It's sort of cute.
So yes, uh. We we got some questions about vaccination
after we talked about Elsa Lanchester and her mother not
wanting her to be vaccinated. Yeah, and that kind of
led me to what how did how did I knew
the basic story was about Jenner and counts Now I
know a lot more of it and how super gross
(34:27):
it was. We could have been way more graphic in
our language in this episode, and we mostly have not
been because I don't think I could stomach it. Yeah,
we're not trying to be gentle with you, We're trying
to be gentle with us. Yes, I could probably stomach it.
But thank you so much for joining us for this
(34:50):
Saturday classic. Since this is out of the archive, if
you heard an email address or a Facebook U r
L or something similar during the course of the show,
that maybe absolete. Now, so here's our current contact information.
We are at History Podcasts, at how stuff works dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History. All over
social media. That is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest,
(35:13):
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
dot com.
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