Rigby5
Diamond Member
Interesting article on our first vaccine. Since I come from a large family we often joke we each passed around some illness, with that also came preventive medicine. As a adult I am never sick but for safety our extended family did get the Covid vaccine. Be safe not a stupid follower.
'Onesimus Spreads Wisdom That Saves Lives of Bostonians During a Smallpox Epidemic'
Black History Month: Onesimus Spreads Wisdom That Saves Lives of Bostonians During a Smallpox Epidemic | History of Vaccines
In the early 1700s, about a century before Edward Jenner conceived the idea of a smallpox vaccine based on the cowpox virus, smallpox was going through New England and other American Colonies. In Massachusetts, colonists there saw smallpox…www.historyofvaccines.org
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Variolation consisted of first taking infectious material (like pus) from the blisters of smallpox patients. A healthy person then receives the material through a cut in the skin in a controlled manner and under the supervision of a physician. This was done so that the smallpox symptoms would be milder but still confer some sort of immunity in the future. Of course, the procedure was not without risk. People still developed severe symptoms and even died from smallpox via variolation, but those who died were in much smaller proportion to those who acquired it naturally from another person. (See how Benjamin Franklin reasoned it through and put his observations in a pamphlet: Epidemiologist Benjamin Franklin | History of Vaccines).
After hearing Onesimus' story, Cotton Mather began to research the practice of variolation. He found that it was practiced in many parts of the world, not just Africa. Or, as he recorded in his diary, "the new Method used by the Africans and Asiaticks, to prevent and abate the Dangers of the Small-Pox, and infallibly to save the Lives of those that have it wisely managed upon them." Places like China and Turkey had their own versions of variolation based on the same principle of exposing a person under controlled circumstances rather allowing them to contract it naturally. The practice was so effective in conferring immunity that African slaves sold in Massachusetts at the time were deemed to be more valuable if they bore the scar of variolation.
This research and correspondence with medical experts at the time encouraged Cotton Mather to push for variolation in the colonies. He burned some of his political and social capital in advocating for variolation before the next epidemic hit Boston. Needless to say, his proposal met with resistance. Anti-variolation sentiment was strong in its response to the idea:
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Exactly.
Total quarantine is one strategy for very deadly diseases, but the other main strategy of variolation, is best for less lethal diseases like covid.
