00:00:00.200Hello, and welcome to the Vulgar History Podcast. My name is Anne Foster, and this is a pandemic
00:00:05.200super special mini episode where we're going to be looking at a past pandemic in global
00:00:12.100history and what people did about it at the time. And today we're going to be looking
00:00:18.780at smallpox, which is a disease that has been around for a very long time. So we're looking
00:00:25.120specifically at the events that led to the development of the smallpox vaccine.
00:00:30.000because um just so you know smallpox has been completely eradicated and if for some
00:00:36.760whatever reason it comes back a vaccine exists so that's good news um yeah smallpox was officially
00:00:45.780eradicated declared eradicated on may 8th 1980 so um that long ago 40 years ago ish so
00:00:55.440So the sources I used to prepare this mini episode were a book called Get Well Soon, History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them by Jennifer Wright, which is a great book.
00:01:08.220And I'm probably going to find those as I was reading through it.
00:01:11.080It's just a bunch of really interesting sort of anecdotes, stories about different pandemics, etc.
00:01:17.040And I kept finding things in that book that made me think would be good mini so.
00:01:21.400So I'm sure I'll be citing that again later.
00:01:23.200um also an article in gizmodo by kiona smith strickland called princesses slaves and explosives
00:01:28.920the scandalous origin of vaccines um i got some info from wikipedia and then also an article from
00:01:36.120smithsonian.com which i'll explain a bit more what that was about when we get to that part of the
00:01:41.940story so what is smallpox so the thing is that um smallpox you get a dangerously high fever
00:01:50.940accompanied by headaches back pain and vomiting painful sores open in your mouth and nose and a
00:01:57.760rash spreads all over your body blisters form and fill with pus these pustules eventually scab over
00:02:03.340and dry up and it has a fatality rate of about 30 so about 30 percent of people who catch smallpox
00:02:09.740at all will die and the rest will live with scars left behind by the pustules um somewhat famously
00:02:18.020queen elizabeth the first had a run-in with smallpox and she there's a whole thing where
00:02:23.680it seemed like she was going to die and this is when she was still pretty young and the whole
00:02:26.940thing was like but who will be her heir and it was a whole drama she recovered um but the scars
00:02:32.100from the smallpox are and i haven't double checked this i'm just telling you this based on what i
00:02:36.700read somewhere um i believe that because the scars that's why she started wearing so much
00:02:40.380um thick white makeup and the makeup was of course lead-based and that was a whole
00:02:45.360other scenario so smallpox horrible um things happen with it when you catch it so it's caused
00:02:53.740by the variola virus um let's see so chicken pox which is caused by a different virus bears
00:03:03.200some resemblance and rarely kills anyone um but one of the reasons that the death rate is so much
00:03:09.460hire for smallpox versus chickenpox is that smallpox makes your immune system go nuts.
00:03:15.500You die because your immune system kills you. So the technical term is an uncontrolled immune
00:03:20.740response. Your immune system identifies an intruding virus or bacteria, and in its attempt
00:03:25.640to rid the body of the danger, basically freaks out. Chemicals are released in the bloodstream
00:03:30.560to fight the infection and trigger inflammation throughout the body. Organs are compromised and
00:03:34.800may shut down. If your immune system attacks your heart and your heart stops pumping blood
00:03:38.720effectively your cells don't have oxygen um and you die if it attacks your kidneys your blood can
00:03:44.200be purified and you die so that's it was it's been a thing we'll get to it for a very long time this
00:03:51.440is a thing that killed a lot of people um we're not talking about the whole history of smallpox
00:03:58.360but it was a big part of the spanish conquest of central america in the sense that the spanish
00:04:07.920people brought over the germs for smallpox and something like 95 percent of the indigenous people
00:04:12.480died um but also well into the 18th century something like 400 000 people in europe would
00:04:18.920die of smallpox as well the thing about it though is that people who survived smallpox those like
00:04:24.020other 70 percent uh developed immunity and a small degree of immunity could be passed down
00:04:29.860through parents which is interesting um one of the reasons perhaps why it was so especially deadly
00:04:37.640for the inca and aztec people when they encountered the spanish as its smallpox like so many illnesses
00:04:44.640is thought to have originated with farm animals especially cattle but also horses and sheep and
00:04:49.260then crossed species to infect humans and the thing is that in european culture um just culturally
00:04:56.400they had a lot of contact with animals like there was the animals horses etc would sleep in barns
00:05:03.380and there might be people close to those barns and stuff,
00:05:05.820whereas the Inca and Aztec people had very little to know contact with those animals.
00:05:12.680There was llamas, but the llamas just kind of hung out in the mountains,
00:05:15.480so there wasn't that close relationship,
00:05:18.040so the disease just wouldn't have manifested there in the same way until the Spanish invaded.
00:05:22.040But again, that is not what today's mini-episode is about,
00:05:25.580because this is just a mini-episode I can't get into,
00:05:28.400every outbreak of smallpox, but that was a notable and horrifying one.
00:05:32.840so um as far back as ancient roman times it was understood that people who had survived smallpox
00:05:40.800once did not get the disease again so there were various of um types of things that people thought
00:05:48.360you could do to make yourself not get sick and one of those methods is what became known as
00:05:54.900variolation so which is sort of exposing people who don't have smallpox to some
00:06:01.760bodily fluid from people who currently have smallpox so the practice this practice seems
00:06:08.520to have sprung up independently in several places in india china west africa and elsewhere
00:06:12.980in 570 ad people in europe started calling it variolation which comes from the latin name for
00:06:19.940smallpox variola and remember it comes from the variola virus so variolation usually meant rubbing
00:06:28.360pus from a smallpox pustule um a good ripe one the runnier the better into a cut or scratch on
00:06:34.800a healthy person's arm and although the method in china was that people would soak a cotton ball
00:06:40.280in infected pus and stick it up their noses so the effect of it is to expose people to a controlled
00:06:47.080amount of smallpox in the hopes that they would develop immunity to it and then be immune to it
00:06:54.220forever because people who had had smallpox were less likely to get it again um other methods the
00:07:01.800transfer might include rubbing infected bits of scab on open wounds or snorting smallpox crusts
00:07:06.900up your nose the uninfected person would usually develop the disease but in a less severe form
00:07:11.920so i mean you'd still have a higher chance of dying of smallpox if you had a variation treatment
00:07:16.600but less of a chance than if you just caught smallpox in the wild effectively uh so in the
00:07:23.060northern caucasus mountains women of the circassian ethnic group traditionally inoculated
00:07:29.280their children at about six months using this violation technique and the circassian women
00:07:34.200carried this knowledge with them when they were trafficked to turkey as sex slaves um which was
00:07:40.360a common fate for many circassians up until the early 20th century so the what would happen here
00:07:47.220it's a descriptor so the french philosopher voltaire described the situation in 1778
00:07:52.400the circassians are poor and their daughters are beautiful and indeed it is in them they chiefly
00:07:57.540trade they furnish with beauties the seraglios of the turkish sultan of the persian sophie and
00:08:02.980of all those who are wealthy enough to purchase and maintain such precious merchandise0.57
00:08:06.820so these are legendarily attractive looking women who became members of the harem of the
00:08:14.320turkish um sultan so the women who ended up in the ottoman sultan's harem with they left their
00:08:21.600mark on turkish culture which is this technique of variation that they had they were one of many
00:08:26.160cultural groups who had discovered it and have been using it for a quarter while uh so again
00:08:30.760voltaire says the turks who are people of good sense soon adopted this custom in as much as that
00:08:36.560there is not a basa in constantinople but communicates the smallpox to his children of
00:08:41.080both sexes immediately upon their being weaned. Inoculation first caught on in Turkey in the late
00:08:46.3401600s because of the Circassian women and we're gonna see what happened from there on. So the0.99
00:08:55.100injection would be done on as well young girls who are being considered for the harem. The injection0.99
00:09:01.340would be done on parts of the body where even if there were some scarring it would be less likely
00:09:04.860to mar their beauty which was what was most literally valuable about them because they were1.00
00:09:09.800being traded as merchandise these girls uh smallpox was a killer but it was also referred to as a0.63
00:09:15.160beauty's enemy um people would lose their good looks uh their face would get these scars on it
00:09:22.840some people lose their sight and become blind uh let's see and then also variolation wasn't like
00:09:29.460super safe obviously um it would help some people not get smallpox later but also you could have a
00:09:35.980severe reaction to the smallpox sample and die uh there was a two to three percent fatality rate
00:09:40.960from variolation but again the fatality rate of smallpox itself is 30 so it's it was risky for
00:09:48.560sure but it did seem to help a lot of people and then so in december of 1715 lady mary wortley
00:09:56.380montague was the daughter of an english duke and the wife of a member of parliament who side note
00:10:02.580she'd eloped to marry this parliamentarian a couple of years earlier because to avoid marrying
00:10:07.920another person and the person she didn't want to marry was named clot worthy skeffington which is
00:10:14.440quite a british sounding name um she was witty she was beauty she was the toast of king george
00:10:20.220the first court and then she got smallpox but she got her beauty was destroyed or whatever
00:10:25.160um but that's okay she was fine otherwise so she left london in 1716 with her husband to go to
00:10:34.140turkey where her husband was the king's new ambassador to the ottoman court and while there
00:10:39.060she observed this tradition of the harem girls who were inoculating their children um perhaps
00:10:47.000one another with this variolation type treatment so the way that she described it mary montague1.00
00:10:54.500said uh there is a set of old women who make it their business to perform the operation every
00:10:59.200autumn in the month of september when the great heat is abated people send to one another to know
00:11:03.840if any of their family has a mind to have the smallpox they make parties for this purpose and
00:11:07.900when they are all met commonly 15 or 16 together the old woman comes with a nutshell full of the
00:11:12.980matter of the best sort of smallpox so just like a nutshell full of pus um and asks which vein you
00:11:18.760please to have open she immediately rips open that you offer to her with a large needle which gives1.00
00:11:23.600you no more pain than a common scratch and puts into the vein as much matter as can lie on the
00:11:28.380head of her needle and after that binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of shell and in
00:11:32.420this manner opens four or five veins so mary montague saw this happen and saw that it was
00:11:39.520working that it was successful so she convinced the embassy surgeon because she was there as the
00:11:45.240ambassador's wife she convinced the embassy surgeon to variolate her own five-year-old son
00:11:51.100Edward and the procedure went well and she was now a woman on a mission so again Mary's own words
00:11:57.640were I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England
00:12:02.660and I should not fail to write to some of our doctors very particularly about it if I knew any
00:12:07.360one of them that I had thought had virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of their
00:12:11.300revenue for the good of mankind but that distemper is too beneficial to them not to expose to all0.99
00:12:16.460their resentment the hearty white that should undertake to put an end to it perhaps if I live0.97
00:12:20.700to return i may however have courage to war with them so she knew that doctors would not be into0.55
00:12:26.160this uh but she just saw for the betterment of all mankind as she phrased it that she this was
00:12:33.800going to be her mission she wanted to help prevent more deaths from smallpox uh so she got charles
00:12:41.280maitland who again is the embassy surgeon she just sounds like a very persuasive woman so she
00:12:47.400got the embassy surgeon to inoculate to very late her four-year-old daughter in a demonstration for0.57
00:12:52.440the royal physicians it worked and in august king george gave maitland permission to conduct a trial
00:12:58.400of the technique on prisoners in london's newgate prison so this is all you know happening outside
00:13:03.980of any sort of like regulations for the safety of vaccine testing but the good news is this it was
00:13:11.040good that no one was like it helped people so six men from the prison volunteered on the promise of
00:13:17.560the king's pardon for the survivors so for them it was the deal was you know get this treatment
00:13:23.440and if you don't die you'll be freed from prison so they're like sure um and guess what it survived
00:13:28.240so all six prisoners survived and later proved to be immune to smallpox and so they moved to
00:13:32.960the next stage of testing um so maitland again this doctor uh began testing the inoculation
00:13:38.840again it's just like oh the methods are like but they uh this is what they did so he went on to
00:13:46.020test on orphan children um who are slightly less expendable than convicted criminals and the
00:13:51.760orphans also survived so then he moved on to inoculating uh princesses so what happened here
00:13:59.000is that um in april of 1722 so the king was clearly very into this um and maitland inoculated
00:14:05.140the daughters of the princess of wales after that inoculation started to catch on in england
00:14:10.960so and elsewhere so king frederick ii of prussia had all of his soldiers treated as did george
00:14:17.560washington at valley forge in 1778 people in france were more resistant to the procedure
00:14:22.700causing voltaire to fume had varulation been practiced in france it would have saved the
00:14:27.160lives of thousands and then so varulation that is the journey of this um injecting people with
00:14:33.660a little bit of the live virus and how that would save a lot of people. And then we move into
00:14:39.600vaccination. So in 1774, a Dorset cattle farmer named Benjamin Jesty, along with two of his
00:14:49.020female servants, Anne Notley and Mary Reed, had been infected with a disease called cowpox. So
00:14:54.660cowpox is a disease that happened to cows. And when humans got it, it just, it wasn't as deadly
00:15:02.860a smallpox it was sort of like a very mild version of smallpox so and the people who often would get
00:15:09.340cowpox are people like milkmaids like dairymaids like people who were there um milking cows etc
00:15:15.320so when an epidemic of smallpox came through town benjamin jesty decided to try to give his wife
00:15:21.580elizabeth and two eldest sons immunity by infecting them with cowpox because the thing is that
00:15:25.860people he saw and other people did we'll talk about them too in a minute a seeming connection
00:15:31.200between cowpox and smallpox such that people who had had cowpox before tended to not get smallpox
00:15:37.520later so benjamin justy infected his wife and two eldest sons by with cowpox he took his family
00:15:45.200to a cow at a farm in nearby town that had the disease and using a darning needle transferred
00:15:50.400pustule pustular material from the cow by scratching their arms the boys had mild local
00:15:56.060reactions and quickly recovered and the wife her arm became inflamed but she also recovered
00:16:01.580his Jesse's experiment was met with hostility by his neighbors he was labeled inhuman and was
00:16:07.820hooted at reviled and pelted whenever he attended markets in the neighborhood the introduction of an
00:16:12.720animal disease into a human body was thought disgusting and some even feared the metamorphosis
00:16:17.640into horned beasts like the people would turn into cows but the treatment it was demonstrated
00:16:24.320when his sons didn't catch smallpox even though they were exposed to it later on the epigraph
00:16:30.000on his tombstone and again this man's name is benjamin jesse his tombstone calls him an upright
00:16:36.400honest man particularly noted for having been the first person known that introduced the cowpox by
00:16:41.660inoculation and who from his great strength of mind made the experiment from the cow
00:16:45.300on his wife and two sons in the year 1774 so then in 1791 a german teacher named peter plett
00:16:53.180inoculated three children with cowpox. He had learned about the connection from milkmaids
00:16:57.860and when he reported his results to professors of medicine at the nearby University of Kiel,
00:17:03.580they basically ignored him and so he just resumed his teaching career and that was it for him.
00:17:07.140But then another guy named Edward Jenner comes along. So Edward Jenner had been very elated
00:17:14.580against smallpox as a child in the traditional way because by that point Mary Montague's crusade
00:17:20.120has was such that it had become sort of a normal thing that people would just be very elated so
00:17:24.780again having a bit of smallpox injected into children who don't have smallpox um edward
00:17:30.440jenner was intrigued by a dairy maid he heard declare i shall never have smallpox for i have
00:17:34.280had cowpox i shall never have an ugly pockmarked face so in 1796 edward jenner found a milkmaid
00:17:40.640with cowpox and injected the matter from one of her sores into an eight-year-old boy um the boy's
00:17:47.300name was oh i have it written down here uh james phipps so he took pus from blisters and scratched
00:17:54.940the arm of eight-year-old james phipps who is the son of jenner's gardener after short and mild
00:18:01.060illness phipps recovered and proved immune to smallpox and so jenner coined the term vaccination
00:18:07.460after the latin root for from the cow the way that vash is the french word for cow so it means
00:18:13.680it's related to the connection between cows and and saving people from smallpox effectively so
00:18:21.200um after he'd done this word spread so children lined up on sundays to get scratched by a doctor
00:18:27.420to get scratched by him um the kids were among the earliest patients ever to be given a small
00:18:31.840bit of cowpox as a way to protect them against a deadly virus known as smallpox which killed 80
00:18:36.860percent of the kids that infected in london uh three out of every 10 people at the time
00:18:40.940so makes the queue the lineup on edward jenner's property grew so long that it snaked across the
00:18:45.960one acre property sprawling lawn ending at the entrance of a small thatched hut into the next
00:18:50.680to the vinery uh originally built as a reading cottage the structure had been transformed into
00:18:56.320what edward jenner dubbed the temple of vaccinia the site of one of britain's first public health
00:19:02.400services so a friend told jenner that selling his vaccine could make him rich but wealth wasn't what
00:19:08.160Jenner was looking for. Instead, he self-published his discoveries in 1798, documenting evidence of
00:19:14.500vaccination success for the first time. The same year he published this information, he sent vaccine
00:19:20.660material to a medical missionary in Newfoundland, in Canada, to carry out the first smallpox
00:19:25.220vaccinations in North America. He was met by skepticism, as did other people who, because this
00:19:31.620whole like cows to human thing people just thought it was uh gross so there was initial skepticism
00:19:38.720from the medical community but smallpox vaccinations began across europe the spanish colonies and the
00:19:44.120newly formed united states napoleon bonaparte vaccinated his troops in 1805 um thomas jefferson
00:19:51.040vaccinated his family um in 1806 thomas jefferson said mendeson has never before produced any single
00:19:59.380improvement of such utility you have erased from the calendar of human afflictions one of its
00:20:03.440greatest mankind can never forget that you have lived so these days the word vaccine is a generic
00:20:10.400term for any substance that causes the body to develop immunity to a disease usually vaccines
00:20:15.860are made from dead or weakened forms of the virus being vaccinated against um modern vaccines use
00:20:22.340viruses or antigens from viruses grown in cultures in a laboratory not actual pus from people's actual
00:20:28.420blisters um in the 20th century alone the smallpox virus killed an estimated 300 million people
00:20:36.160according to the world health organization in 1959 the group launched a global eradication
00:20:40.800program and 40 years later on may 8th 1980 it declared smallpox eradicated so far it is the
00:20:46.800only disease that has been completely wiped out in humans through a vaccination type situation
00:20:53.340there's other diseases that were around and then mysteriously vanished but this is one that like
00:20:57.860was actively removed uh so this was the first building block on the road to safe vaccines in
00:21:03.780general which have since been developed for many life-threatening diseases such as polio
00:21:07.420measles meningitis and diphtheria and i wanted to mention as well so edward jenner who was one of a
00:21:15.240few people who figured out this cowpox smallpox connection but was the one who really um advocated
00:21:21.920for it and sort of made it widespread so his home is his former home is now a museum that is called
00:21:30.740dr jenner's house it's called dr jenner's house museum and garden in berkeley england and it's
00:21:36.740privately funded um due to covid19 without visitor income the future of this museum is at risk so i'm
00:21:44.920they have a crowdfunding page and i'll put a link to that in the show notes because as they say in
00:21:50.600the video dr jenner's house needs you so his house museum which is it looks like a really sweet i've
00:21:57.220not personally been there um but i when i am able to go to the united kingdom it's a place that i
00:22:02.960really hope to be able to visit so at this museum so it's at the same place where edward jenner
00:22:08.840carried out his pioneering research into vaccination um they celebrate his achievements
00:22:12.380and show how curiosity can change the world so if you want to read about the museum and help support
00:22:18.060it. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. But otherwise, that is the storied and interesting
00:22:23.320and surprising history of smallpox vaccination and variolation. I particularly, as a feminist
00:22:30.660historian, I appreciate how the dairymaids, how the victims of this sex trafficking, these sex0.99
00:22:39.200slaves, how they ended up bringing the information about this, like that their town, their area had0.53
00:22:46.220figure this out they brought it with them when they were trafficked um then mary montague saw
00:22:51.120this happening understood how amazing and game-changing this could be she brought it back
00:22:56.680convinced a bunch of people about it really it paved the way for for a lot of medical treatments
00:23:01.340that we have now um and again i'm just glad in general to know that smallpox has been completely
00:23:07.380eradicated but in case it comes back for whatever reason there's a stockpile of the vaccine um