The Parallel Lives

On May 8, 1980, forty-five years ago, the World Health Organization, a part of the United Nations, announced that officials had eradicated small pox from the world’s population. The last case occurred in Somalia in 1977, and the last case in the United States occurred in 1949. 

     This news delighted everyone, in that small pox had plagued humanity for centuries. Human ingenuity had defeated small pox, a triumph of science, of technology, and of a strategy. 

     Whenever WHO officials heard of a breakout of small pox, they would rush into the nearby villages and neighborhoods and vaccinate as much of the population as they could to prevent the epidemic from spreading too far. Done again and again, they circled and beat down the disease. 

     Small pox is caused by variola virus. It is contagious and will spread from person to person. A fever gives way to a rash, that turns into numerous poxes, skin eruptions that fill with fluid.

     An estimated three out of ten people died from the disease. If they lived, their skin, especially their face, was pockmarked. The most famous of those so afflicted was George Washington.

     Cotton Mather was a Puritan clergyman in colonial Boston at the North Church. Mather noticed that, beginning in 1630, a small pox epidemic would arrive about every twelve years. 

     Kenneth Silverman, Mather’s biographer, wrote, “The small pox epidemic that struck Boston in April of 1721 lasted a full twelve months and infected half the city’s population. By February 1722, 5,889 persons had suffered an infection, and of those 844 had died.”

     As the epidemic gathered momentum, Cotton decided he must fight back.

     From the Royal Society in London, Cotton learned about inoculation as a preventative treatment. In addition, an African slave named Onesimus, who lived in Cotton’s home in Boston, told the clergyman about his experience in Africa and what his people, the Guramantese, did.

     Onesimus explained,

     “People take Juice of Small-Pox; and cutty-skin, and putt in a Drop; then by and by a little sicky, sicky; then very few little things like Small-Pox; and no body die of it; and no body have Small-Pox any more.” Onesimus showed Cotton the scar on his arm.

     Cotton convinced a doctor in Boston, Zabdiel Boylston, to inoculate some three hundred people in Boston. Only one person, a lady with other health issues, died, and none of the three hundred came down with the disease. Dozens lived who may have died without inoculation.

     James Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s older brother, owned a Boston newspaper, the “New England Courant.” Scathing and vicious, James attacked in print Cotton and Boylston, for trying an untested preventative technology, but James’s hateful words did not stop the two men. 

     Much of the credit for inoculation though is given to a British physician named Edward Jenner. Late in the 18th century, in Gloucestershire, England, Jenner noticed that milkmaids who suffered from cowpox lesions upon their hands were immune to small pox. 

     Cowpox was benign when contrasted to small pox, just a few lesions on the hands. 

     In 1796, Jenner conducted a daring experiment. He withdrew fluid from a cowpox lesion on the hand of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes, and injected that fluid into a cut on the arm of an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps, son of Jenner’s gardener. 

     Later, Jenner exposed the young Phipps to small pox, but the lad did not demonstrate small pox’s symptoms, proving that the lad now enjoyed immunity to small pox. 

     Jenner’s process received the name “vaccination,” taken from the Latin word for cow, vacca.

     While others screamed their opposition, science, co-joined with technology and a working strategy, subdued and then eradicated small pox, a triumph of human ingenuity.

     Modernity demanded vaccination. Because of it, the dreaded small pox disease evaporated.