Original in Spanish: La viruela y las vacunas
Smallpox killed people by the millions, at a time when the world’s population was tiny.
It was extremely contagious, level: I slept in the same bed, I’m screwed. Infected people were still dangerous even while recovering, after the scabs had already fallen off. Plenty of kings and rich people caught it, and those are not the kind to hang around people covered in pustules. Nobody was really safe.
Roll a d10: more than a 6 and you’re dead. If you’re lucky and roll less, you’ll only go blind from corneal ulcers, or sterile, or disfigured. Nobody is going to remove the scars all over your body. If you’re a small child you don’t even need to roll the die; smallpox was especially good at killing children. In India they didn’t even name children until they had survived it; you may very well die and that’s that.
Around 430 BC a sharp Athenian called Thucydides already noticed that smallpox never struck the same person twice. The guy thought that maybe it wasn’t that The Gods had punished them enough, but that people somehow “learned” to defend themselves. I struggle to imagine the clear-sightedness needed to reach that idea with the clues available back then. Without tools like statistics, without data… when it’s so easy to drift along with the inertia of inherited thinking.
Well, knowing it couldn’t hit you twice was great, but it was useless to the healthy, because let’s say that playing Russian roulette on the off chance of winning peace of mind, given the number of bullets in the chamber, wasn’t a reasonable option either. In some places they did things like snorting dried-up scabs, or scraping pustules and letting them dry for a long time before putting them in a cut, hoping to catch a milder version the body could beat. But of course, there was no way to actually KNOW how big your dose of live virus would be. Bad business.
The story of the cows and the stroke of luck mixed with Jenner’s genius is known by many. Another decisive step, but not enough.
Real life is not like the movies where they discover the antidote, the credits roll, and the problem is solved. Now go convince people to voluntarily introduce the horror into their bodies to gain immunity, and distribute the solution across a world without transoceanic flights, without fridges, without little vials to keep the bug dozy for a side-effect-free vaccination.
Besides, how shall I put it, less than 50 years earlier giving birth in a hospital was still buying tickets in the puerperal fever lottery because nobody there washed their hands. Trust that the good doctor would save your skin was… shaky. There was a lot left to learn.
Putting that knowledge into practice in that era was a gigantic problem for solving a very grave humanitarian tragedy. I imagine they felt the way you would feel today holding the solution to world hunger in the palm of your hand, with logistics failing you and no idea how to distribute it. Personally I think I would tear my hair out and bang my head against the wall in pure frustration.
Since Jenner, the trick was putting cowpox pus into a wound. But the bug in the pus stayed alive only so long. Taking sick cows on ships to America to vaccinate people there wasn’t viable, but it was known that someone carrying cowpox could pass it to another person; they called it “arm to arm” inoculation.
Well, around that time there was a nurse with ovaries of steel called Isabel Zendal, who volunteered to care for 21 children who passed the virus from one to another to carry salvation by ship to America and India. Among them: her own son. It was called the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition and I wish I had more time to tell you the details, maybe later, but I’ve been reading about this woman for hours now and I swear everything about her blows my mind. What a woman. Google around if you feel like it.
Google also Viktor Zhdanov, and the Yugoslavia story, or read it on Yuri’s blackboard (link below), it’s also mind-blowing.
Even today we don’t know how to cure smallpox, we only know how to prevent it, although it’s no longer necessary because it’s finally considered eradicated: the last case was in 1977. It’s astonishing what we humans can do when we agree on something, truly, it’s incredible.
Vaccinate your kids, damn it.
Gracias D. y A.
https://lapizarradeyuri.blogspot.com/2010/06/viruela-cuando-la-mano-del-hombre-fue.html
https://www.publico.es/sociedad/isabel-zendal-enfermera-vacuna-viruela.html
Related: Isabel Zendal
(Facebook, 2019-03-16)