Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), Edward Jenner (1749–1823)
Smallpox is the most devastating disease ever to afflict the human race. During the eighteenth century, it killed some 400,000 Europeans each year and caused one-third of all cases of blindness. As recently as the twentieth century, smallpox was reported to be responsible for 300–500 million deaths worldwide.
This highly contagious disease has infected humans for more than 10,000 years. As the result of aggressive vaccination programs during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, smallpox became the first disease successfully exterminated through the efforts of science when it was certified by the World Health Organization to be eradicated in 1979. Quite clearly then, the smallpox vaccine ranks among the most significant of all drugs.
Writer and poet Lady Mary Wortley Montagu initially sparked European interest in a vaccine. Upon her return to England from Constantinople in the early 1720s, she aggressively promoted the local practice of variolation, or the inoculation against smallpox using materials obtained from a smallpox lesion—a practice that was rapidly and widely adopted in English-speaking countries and in the American colonies.
Folk experience in the English countryside suggested that dairymaids who had contracted the mild cowpox were spared from smallpox. Between the 1770s and 1790s, a number of individuals tested a cowpox vaccination, but English physician Edward Jenner validated the approach. In 1796, Jenner inoculated an eight-year-old boy with cowpox material, and the boy remained healthy after being exposed to smallpox. Jenner then replicated these results in twenty-three individuals and published his results. Although there was initial opposition, smallpox vaccinations soon became a routine practice in Europe and the United States. Closely related to the cowpox virus, Vaccinia virus has been used since the nineteenth century for smallpox vaccinations, which were so successful that, by 1986, routine vaccinations were no longer necessary in any country.
Smallpox was used as a biological weapon during the French and Indian War (1754–1763) when the British gave two blankets exposed to smallpox to Delaware tribe members. Contemporary interest has focused upon smallpox’s potential use by rogue governments or terrorists in biological warfare.
SEE ALSO Polio Vaccine (1954), Cipro (1987), Gardasil (2006).
This poster, exhorting parents to get their children vaccinated against smallpox, was distributed between 1936 and 1941 by the Chicago Board of Health.