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