Of the oldest infectious diseases
Pox could be very cruel, undiscerning
Cow and chicken seem harmless, small teases
But great was its effect, scabbing, scarring
Killing millions, from Aztecs to royalty
Few were spared, bar those infected before
With a lesser pox, whose pus, as fealty
Variolated those with early sores
When refined, this led to vaccination
Mr. Jenner’s discovery, simple
As it was damaging his reputation
Took ages for others to grasp this pimple
Millions to zero in two hundred years
He saved the world from smallpox quaking fears
Backstory
Although historians have speculated that smallpox infected human more than 10,000 years ago, and provided credible theories about such infections in Egyptian times, using markings on mummies as evidence, there is widespread agreement that it was a devastating disease in both Greece and Rome when in their heydays. There is reason to believe that the highly contagious disease spread across much of North Africa and Western Asia, and it was the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors who took it to South America, devastating Aztecs and other groups.
In the early eighteenth century it was realized that no-one could contract smallpox twice; a preventive method was therefore introduced, primarily in England, in which pus or scabs were taken from previous sufferers of the disease and inoculated into those newly infected; this was called variolation. It was not wildly successful, and eventually prohibited by law, but it did lead to the thought that, performed differently and carefully, this ‘technique’ could be used for minimizing the spread of infection. Dr. Edward Jenner, was born in Gloucestershire, England in 1749 and trained as a physician under John Hunter in London. In 1796 he performed an experiment using pus from a milkmaid who had cowpox, a viral disease somewhat similar to smallpox; he injected this into the arm of an 8 year old boy, and showed, through a subsequent regime of variolation that did not infect him, that it was possible to protect against smallpox without ever having been exposed to it. Jenner called this treatment vaccination. Some people might say ‘the rest is history’ but it wasn’t easy. He tried to publish this work with the Royal Society but they rejected him saying that he should not promulgate such as wild idea if he valued his reputation. In 1980 the World Health Organization declared that smallpox had been eradicated (apart from samples retained in guarded laboratories in Atlanta and Moscow).
