Primary Source Analysis

Smallpox

• Highly contagious

• Airborne disease (communicated by dust particles or droplets and enters the body through the respiratory tract)

• If victims survive, they typically acquire lifelong immunity

• Variola major carries with it a 30% mortality rate 

• Inflammatory fever, little boils

Impact on Small Pox in North America

• Smallpox struck New England in 1633, the epidemic reduced the pequots in souther ct from 13,000 people to 3000 people

• Epidemics hit Boston several times

• Outbreaks of 1721, 1752, 1764, 1775 were particularly severe, death rates high 

• In 1721, the fatality was nearly 15% among those who contracted the malady 

what to do when smallpox arrives

• Public health measures: flee 

• Isolation: denotes the separation and confinement of subjects already known to be infected with contagious disease to prevent them from transmitting disease to other people

• Quarantine: essentially involved the same procedures but it was carried out on suspected transmitters of disease

inoculation

• employed in China, India, and Africa for centuries 

  • Deliberately give someone smallpox, make incision in arm of healthy person, deposit some of that matter and hope that they get a mild form of smallpox 

  • Different ways: some dry out matter and thread it under the skin but also taking knife

  • It entailed taking pus collected from a pustule of a smallpox suffer and placing it under the skin of a healthy individual to create a local infection and a mild form of the disease, thereby conferring life-long immunity against what might otherwise be a virulent and fatal case 

  • The procedure was invasive and painful 

  • A preventative measure that involves taking liquid form the pustules of an infected person and inserting them into a superficial wound on a healthy person to give them  milder case of the disease

    • It has been widely practiced in the middle east/east

    • Lady mary montague (1689-1762) the wife of an English statesman who was stationed in Turkey had it performed on her children, they survived

  • Used prisoners then orphaned children - vulnerable populations

Cotton Mather (1663-1728)

• Reads about it, asks his slave Onesimus if he has had smallpox, he said yes/no 

  • Inoculation description 

• How is it not a trick? Slaves too simple

  • Being a vessel god can speak through 

• Drama so bad, Mather’s house was going to be firebombed, did not go off but was a warning

direct primary source

diaries, letters, treatise, image, other “ego documents” 

indirect primary source

inventories, lists, collections 

questions to ask

• Under what specific historical circumstances was this source created? Is this source consistent with what you know about the historical record from that time?

• Whose views are being represented? Always keep in mind the historical context of the source? Also consider the context

• What do you learn from this source? What is its significance?

vaccination

• Jenner heard of these cases and learned through careful observation what the relationship was between smallpox and cowpox

• Jenner distinguished between different kind of illnesses that dairy workers had trying to determine if they had cowpox or a staph infection, or some other skin eruption

• Other physicians had also investigated the relationship between the two 

• This use of cowpox to protect against smallpox becomes basis of vaccination

• When talking about vaccination, cowpox matter that person gets that protects the person from smallpox - 1796, Jenner

Edward Jenner

1749-1823: English physician, notes for systematically testing the practice of vaccination - a preventative measure that protected people against smallpox 

Smallpox and cowpox turns out to be

orthopoxviruses which causes bumpy rash (zoonotic disease - can infect humans and animals)

more info

• In 1768 country doctors who used a largely successful method for smallpox inoculation found it ineffective in people who had said they recently had cowpox 

• But there also cases of people who said they had cowpox and inoculation did work

• In May 1796, Jenner encountered Sarah Nelms a dairymaid with fresh cowpox lesions on her hands and arms. Jenner used matter from Nelms lesion to inoculate an 8 year old pauper James Phipps, fell ill, it was mild then recovered

• In July 1797 Jenner inoculated the boy again this time with matter from a fresh smallpox lesion no disease developed

• This careful experimentation plus the already circulating hypothesis that people who recently had cowpox could not get smallpox led to Jenner's discovery - took him roughly 25 years to unravel