November 20, 2013 • 40 mins
Smallpox has been around longer than recorded history. It killed royalty, shifted the tides of battles, and was so terrifying that many religions have gods, saints and martyrs associated with it. And Edward Jenner gets the credit for changing all that.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy Will, I'm Holly Front. They were going
to talk about smallpox, super fun topics. Well, and it's
(00:21):
been pretty much gone for long enough that I think
most people don't really have a sense of just what
it was like. Like, I think the closest equivalent most
people have today's chicken pox. But even if that doesn't
touch it in terms of horrifying this No, even now
that we have chicken pox vaccine, a lot of people
have never experienced chicken pox. And I coincidentally never got
(00:43):
chicken pox. What Yeah, I had to be vaccinated for
it as I grown up because I never got it
as a child, neither did my brother. So smallpox it's
not like super chicken pox. It's been around for longer
than recorded history, and it probably originated in Africa more
than ten thousand years ago, and it spread around the
(01:04):
world following migration and trade. We have physical evidence that
it existed as far back as six b C, thanks
to the mummified head of Ramsey's the Fifth, which has
evidence of smallpox physically. It was also described in writing
in China and India at about the same time. But
based on all that knowledge, it's pretty clear that smallpox
(01:28):
existed before writing did. Yeah, and there are several types
of smallpox, and there are there's a range of possible
complications that can come from it, but in general, uh,
it causes these small, pus filled lesions on the skin,
and people that have it also get a fever normally
and other flu like symptoms. And when it existed in
(01:50):
the wild, uh, it was fatal and roughly of all
cases for babies, that number was between eight and so
a really high mortality rate. And in the eighteenth century,
as much as ten percent of the population of Europe
died of smallpox every year, and more than three d
million people died of smallpox during the twentieth century. Those
(02:12):
are numbers that I bet people were not expecting. No,
they're pretty enormous. Yeah, that's a lot of people. Yeah,
it's a contagious disease and once somebody had it, there
was really not anything that could be done. Most treatments
that people tried did not have any real medical value.
One was called the red treatment, which was basically surrounding
the patient with the color red, but the patient did
(02:33):
have to be clean, fed and cared for until the
scabs fell off, and that was a few weeks after
the pox started to form. Smallpox was contagious that entire time,
so it spread really easily among families, caregivers, and other
people who were living in close quarters, and the people
that survived having smallpox often had extensive and disfiguring scarring.
(02:56):
There were actually etiquette manuals that offered advice on how
to word a condolence letter to your friend after her
lovely face had been horribly disfigured and scarred by smallpox.
Many survivors also faced other complications, including blindness, and before
it's eradication, smallpox actually caused more blindness than any other condition.
(03:17):
So this disease killed royalty, It changed lines of succession,
It struck down armies in the field, and shifted the
tide of battle. An epidemic near the end of the
Roman Empire killed almost seven million people, and when it
was introduced into the America's it devastated the native population,
and it was also spread to native people's on purpose
(03:38):
as a form of germ warfare during the French and
Indian War. It was so influential and terrifying. That many
polytheistic religions have gods of smallpox, and there are Christian
saints and martyrs associated with it and its victims as well.
So smallpox was a disease deeply dreaded and feared and
it did not mess around. But one and gets the
(04:01):
credit thankfully changed all of this, and that was Edward Jenner.
And he's the topic of most of this podcast. Yeah,
but before we talk about him, we kind of need
to talk about like the state of the world before
he came along. We've talked a little bit about the
germ theory of disease and how it did not really
start to spread around the United States and Europe until
(04:22):
the eighteen hundreds, but people weren't completely clueless about ideas
like contagiousness and immunity before this point. People knew that
if you were around someone who had smallpox for a
long time, you would probably get it too. And for
more than two thousand years, people have also known that
a person who had survived smallpox wasn't likely to get
it again, So smallpox survivors were tapped often to care
(04:46):
for the sick because they appeared to be protected. So
it's not really a far jump from those two ideas
to the thought that maybe you could give somebody smallpox
on purpose so that they would be immune later, sort
of how like the vaccine. Sometimes parents would send their
kids to play with somebody who had chicken pox to
get it over with. I guess they're probably parents who
(05:07):
don't want to immunize their children who still do this,
but it would take a lot more efforts, since chicken
boxes a lot more rare now. Yeah, And that was
often done, especially with young children, because allegedly, if you
get chicken pox younger less horrible than if you get
it older. Getting chicken pox as an adult can be
extremely horribly painful, which is why I have had a vaccine.
(05:30):
So the thing is that for the most part, this
whole method of um of exposing to somebody to smallpox
on purpose actually a whole lot grosser than chicken pox parties.
Oh yeah. The earliest attempts to deal with this happened
in China at least a thousand years ago, but in
sixteen seventy traders introduced the practice to the Ottoman Empire,
(05:54):
where it started to progress to other nations. Sometimes it
was as simple as deliberately exposing yourself to someone with
a relatively mild case of the disease. But a more
direct method and also the grosser one, was to use
a needle or a lancet to extract matter from an
infected person smallpox lesions and put it under the scan
(06:15):
of a healthy person. Sometimes the material would be dried
out or stored at room temperature for a while so
it wasn't as lethal as fresh material. And another method
was to inhale dried material from a smallpox lesion or
a crushed up smallpox gab. Yeah, I know this sounds
just terrible. It sounds like the sort of thing that
(06:36):
we would hear about on saw bones that we keep
mentioning is is like a thing that's just a terrible idea,
but that actually worked. Yeah. After this exposure, the healthy
person would usually wind up with a case of smallpox
that was less severe than if it had been caught naturally.
So you can see where there would be a certain
appeal to this concept, like I will at least control
my exposure and hopefully get a mild version rather than
(06:58):
just cross my fingers and wait for the really horrible
case of smallpox to his for disfigurement, blindness, and death.
This practice became known as both inoculation and vary elation.
So inoculation is from a Latin word meaning to graft
or to implants, so think of like grafting a bud
from one tree to another. Vary Elation comes from bariola,
(07:20):
which is the name for the virus that causes smallpox,
and then bariola comes from Latin words meaning spots or pimples.
And the practice of vary elation spread first through India, China,
and Africa, and by the eighteenth century it had made
its way to Europe as well. It was slow to
catch on though, uh In the early eighteenth century, Edward
Wortley Montague was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and while
(07:44):
he was there, his wife, Lady Mary Worley Montague, whose
face had been scarred from her own bout of smallpox,
learned about vary elation. But in seventeen eighteen she ordered
the embassy surgeon to perform variolation on her son. This
procedure was successful and she had her daughter inoculated in
seventeen twenty one. After they got back to London. The
(08:06):
medical community in England was not too sure about all this,
so naturally, the next people who are very elated were prisoners.
We've discussed the previous podcasts that there are times when
people say it's not so much risk to use a
prisoner or a criminal, let's just put them at risk. Yeah,
there there are many ethical considerations in the history of
(08:27):
small box. But from the air and some successful experimentation,
the practice spread through the English aristocracy and into the
rest of Europe. Vary elation made its way to the
America's shortly thereafter. Reverend Cotton Mather and Dr Zabdial Wolfston
used it to try to curb a smallpox epidemic in
Boston in seventy one. About half of Boston's population got
(08:53):
the uh got the virus. During this outbreak. About fourteen
percent of those who got it naturally died, and that
compared to two percent of the people who had been
vary elated. So Math and Boilston documented all of their
progress and with these results that showed that it was
overall of success. You know, variolating people was way less
(09:14):
deadly than getting smallpox naturally. The practice started to become
more common on both sides of the Atlantic, and variolation worked,
but it was not foolproof. People still died as we
just mentioned, and survivors uh still had scars after they recovered.
Sometimes a very elated patient would spread smallpox to other people,
(09:36):
accidentally causing an outbreak anyway, and other diseases like syphilis, hepatitis,
and scrofula, which is usually caused by the same bacterium
that causes tuberculosis, could also be transmitted during this variolation process. Overall,
varilation was about eight percent effective and it had a
two percent mortality rate, so it was better than getting
(09:57):
smallpox the normal way. There was still a lot of
room for improvement, and that leads us to Edward Jenner.
He was born on May seventeen, seventeen forty nine in Barkley, Gloucestershire.
He was the eighth of nine children, and he went
to live with his brother after being orphaned at the
age of five. In seventeen fifty seven, when he was
(10:17):
eight years old, he was inoculated for smallpox. He started
an apprenticeship when he was in his early teens, working
with a surgeon and apothecary named Daniel Ludlow. He was
Lidlow's apprentice for several years and as the story goes,
it was while there that he heard a dairymaid say
that she would never get smallpox because she had had
cow pox. Cow Pox, like smallpox, is a virus. Cows
(10:41):
get it and it causes them to get these sores
on their utters. People who came in contact with these
sores while they were milking could get cow pox from
the cow, and it would cause similar sores on their
hands and lower arms. This was normally a really mild disease,
and the idea that someone who had had cow pox
before would not also get smallpox was either conventional wisdom
(11:02):
or country superstition, depending on who you asked. And in
addition to all that, milk needs were reputed to have
extremely beautiful complexions. They are the subjects of poems because
of their lovely skin, presumably because none of them had
smallpox scars. Jenner continued to study medicine and surgery for
the next several years, apprenticing with George Harwick in seventeen
(11:23):
sixty four and with John Hunter at St. George's Hospital
in London after he turned twenty one, And in addition
to his interest in medicine, uh Jenner was also adept
at other areas of science. He studied and observed animals,
He collected fossils, and he helped classify newly documented specimens.
He also something of a renaissance man, liked to play
(11:44):
the violin and write poems. And as we have in
a practice we have alluded to previously in a recent episode,
he was a balloonist, and he built and flew his
own hydrogen balloon. Ballooning was all the rage at this point. Uh,
And in seventy six he decided to try experiment, building
off the idea that cow pox granted immunity from smallpox.
(12:05):
What if, as with vary elation, you could deliberately give
someone cow pox. So a dairy maid named Sarah Elms
came to see Jenner about the sore that she had
on her hand, and he examined her, said it looked
like cow pox, and she confirmed that one of the
cows that she milked had recently had cow pox. And
(12:26):
the cow that gave Sarah smallpox was named Blossom. Blossom
skin is actually on display in the University of London
Library at St George's Hospital. It was removed for restoration
in and replaced in August. UH. She was a Gloucester cow,
which has horns in both the males and the females.
(12:47):
So if you see the pictures of the skin, it
has horns on it, which some people who are not
used to seeing female cows with horns maybe confusing. Yeah,
I think it's kind of darling that her name was
Blossom and a little morbid than skin is still on
display in a museum. It's such a wonderfully morbid thing.
So Jenner extracted material from this sore and he used
(13:10):
it to inoculate an eight year old boy named James Fips,
and he was the son of Jenner's gardener. So what
he did was he scratched James's arm and he rubbed
the material from Sarah's sore into it. James went through
a range of mild flu like symptoms and then he recovered.
A couple of months later, Jenner inoculated James again, this
(13:32):
time with fresh material from a smallpox sore. When James
didn't get smallpox, Jenner concluded that his experiment was in
fact a success. He decided to call his method vaccination
from the Latin words for cow and cow pox. So
before we talk about how this wound up radically changing
the world. We would be remiss if we didn't talk
about some of the other people who had come to
(13:54):
the same conclusion at about the same time. Twenty two
years earlier, an affluent tenant farmer named ben Jamin Jesti
had performed this same basic procedure on his wife and
his two sons during a smallpox outbreak in their area.
He had gotten the idea because he and two of
his milk maids had all had cow pox before, and
neither none of them had ever gotten smallpox in spite
(14:15):
of being exposed to it repeatedly. Jest took his wife
and two children to a field where some cows were
infected with cow pox, and he used a stocking needle
to transfer some material from the cow sores to their
arms his wife are. His wife's arm became infected and
she almost lost it, but all three of his family
members came through the outbreak without being infected. His sons
(14:38):
were inoculated with smallpox later on and had no reaction,
and they were all exposed to smallpox multiple times afterwards.
The ever got it despite the arm infection. It was
as successful though unsettling operations yes, and Jesti was the
target of all kinds of derision and scorn in his
community because of what he had done, and while word
(15:01):
did spread of his actions in the local medical community,
there's no written evidence that Jenner ever heard about it.
A schoolmaster named Peter Plett also put cow pox to
similar use in Holstein, Germany in sevente using material from
a cow on his employers two daughters. They were the
only children to survive an epidemic that struck three years later,
(15:22):
but one of them also had a strong enough reaction
when he did this experiment that he didn't go further
with the idea. A third man, John Fuster, was a
very elation practitioner, and in seventeen sixty three he vary
related two brothers, and one of them, who turned out
to have had cow pox before, didn't have any reaction.
So his brother got smallpox in a mild form, but
(15:45):
nothing happened to him. So consequently Fuster wondered if cow
pox might prevent smallpox, and he wrote a paper on
the idea that he never published. He made some attempts
at inoculating people with cow pox at roughly the same
time as Jenner made his first attempts, although it's really
unclear as to whether he and Jenner, who did know
(16:05):
each other, ever talked about it. So then we sort
of get to the question of what separates Jenner from
these men and what earned him the nickname of Father
of immunology, and it's that he made vaccination his life's work. Yeah,
there's been several articles that have come out in the
last ten or fifteen years that are sort of like,
Jenner doesn't deserve this title. So and So did it
(16:26):
twenty years before he did. And while it is true
that he wasn't the first person ever in history to
try this thing, he absolutely devoted himself to trying to
uh to to protect as many people as possible from
smallpox using cowpox from this point on, so much so
that his other medical practice actually started to suffer. The
(16:48):
first thing that he did was that he submitted a
paper to the Royal Society in sev but it was
rejected and he got a note from the society's president
that he really should be concerned about his reputation. So
taking that into consideration, he repeated his experiment a few times,
and then he wrote up an Inquiry into the Causes
and Effects of the very La Vaccinate, A disease discovered
(17:11):
in some of the western counties of England, particularly Gloucestershire,
and known by the name of cow pox. Just a
lengthy title for a paper. I love the lengthy paper title.
You can read this one online for free. Yeah. And
that paper detailed his theories about the origins of cow pox.
He thought it came from a horse ailment which is
casually called Greece, which was later disproved, and he listed
(17:33):
a number of case studies involving cow pox and smallpox immunity.
He published his paper, financing it himself the next year.
So the response to his publication and his ongoing vaccination
work was mixed at best. People were really reluctant to
believe that what he was proposing could work. Cow Pox
was also not a really prevalent illness, especially in towns
(17:56):
and cities, which made it kind of hard to get
the material people needed to make backs nations. Uh. One
of the things about variolation was that there was smallpox everywhere.
You could easily get smallpox to inoculate other people with.
Not so much so with cow pox because precautions like
hand washing and sterilization we're not being used yet. Sometimes
(18:17):
cow pox vaccines would become adulterated with smallpox through cross
contamination that would make it look like a person had
gotten smallpox from their cow pox vaccine, and people who
made money off of variolation who are super opposed to
Jenner's idea, as you can imagine, it would be a
natural response. People also objected to vaccination on religious grounds
(18:40):
or because they believe that cows were lesser than humans
and so that humans should not be contaminated with material
from cows. Clergy would speak against the idea of quote
contaminating humans with a substance from a sick animal. The
Anti Vaccine Society published a satirical cartoon called the cow
poc or The Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation, And
(19:02):
this was a drawing of a group of people all
being vaccinated and they were all growing cow heads out
of their bodies. This was drawn by British satirist James Gilray.
A year after Jenner had published his pamphlet, he conducted
a survey to try to conclusively prove that cowpox did
in fact confer smallpox immunity. Only once that was done,
(19:22):
with the answer being a pretty decisive yes, it does.
In fact confer small pox immunity. Did vaccination gradually begin
to gain acceptance, And we're gonna talk about how has
changed the world in a minute, but first we're gonna
talk about Jenner's personal life before we get to that point.
It's a lot of what really was successful happened after
he died in seventy eight. He got married and he
(19:44):
eventually had four children. They built a cottage in the
garden where he would give free vaccinations to poor children,
and he called this the Temple of Vaccinia. Jenner would
give vaccine to anybody who asked him for it for free,
so the actual vaccination work was carried out by many
other people. He started to call himself the vaccine Clerk
(20:04):
to the world, and he developed new ways to collect
and preserve cowpox material for the vaccines. Jenner put so
much effort into vaccination that his own medical practices Tracy
mentioned earlier, really started to fail. Around the start of
the nineteenth century, Jenner gradually started to pull away from
public life. His work had drawn huge praise, but it
(20:26):
had also gotten a whole lot of judgment and scorned
from people who feared what he was doing or questioned
his practices. He received quite a number of awards and
honors for his work, including several honorary degrees, and he
received a medal from Napoleon in eighteen o four, and
Napoleon so respected him that he was able to negotiate
(20:46):
the release of British prisoners of war during the Napoleonic Wars.
Statues have been erected in Jenner's honor all over the world.
Parliament granted Jenner ten thousand pounds in eighteen o two
for his vaccination work, and that was followed by another
twenty thousand pounds five years later, and this is millions
of today's dollars. Vaccination gradually started to overtake variolation in popularity,
(21:11):
and in eighteen forty England prohibited variolation outright, since the
vaccination was had at this point proved to be much safer,
and this sparked protests from people who objected to vaccination
for one reason or another and wanted to have variolation
available as a choice. Tragically, although Jenner did so much
work to stop the spread of smallpox at the time,
(21:33):
tuberculosis was still a very common and deadly illness, and
it also was not particularly treatable. He lost his oldest
son to tuberculosis in eighteen ten and his wife in
eighteen fifteen, and he had other deaths in his family
in the intervening years. Edward Jenner did not, as was
his custom, come down for breakfast on January eighteen twenty three,
(21:57):
and he was found in his room having had a
massive stroke. Uh. He died shortly thereafter on January. And
really at this point his legacy was just at its
earliest stages. And we're going to talk about that in
just a moment, but first we will take a minute
and talk about So now let's get back to how
really the groundwork that Edward Dinner laid actually changed the world. Yeah,
(22:23):
as we mentioned before, although other people had made this
same discovery that Jenner did, and even earlier than he had,
it was still Jenner's tireless work that really started the
world on a path to eradicating smallpox. It is, at
least as of when we are recording this, the only
disease that mankind has eradicated from the planet. Uh. Currently,
the only samples of it that remain are in laboratories.
(22:47):
Vaccination was pretty prevalent in Europe by eighteen hundred in
eighteen oh three and really just one of my favorite
stories that maybe we will do whole episode on later.
Francisco Xavier to Balmus, acting on behalf of King Charles
the Fourth, started an expedition from Spain to South America
via the Canary Islands, and the goal of this expedition
(23:07):
was to deliver vaccine to South America and Asia. So
at this point, the preservation methods that were used to
h to make the vaccine just they couldn't keep it
potent over such a long and hot voyage. So they
had to come up with a different method, which was
that they rounded up twenty two orphans who had never
(23:28):
had cowpox or smallpox and used them as a chain
of human carriers to allow the vaccine to reach the Caribbean.
There are many ethical employee implications of this practice, simultaneously
ingenious and a little spine chilling. Yeah. So basically they would,
you know, infect one person before the voyage started and
(23:48):
then pass it from person to person as they crossed
the sea. So so many moral layers to what we
were talking about. I cannot even scratch the surface of
it with my my pitiful moral attempts. But in eighteen
o seven, Bavarians became the first to require military recruits
(24:09):
to be vaccinated for smallpox, since troop movements had always
been a major factor in the spread of the disease.
In eighteen fifty three, England made smallpox vaccination compulsory. Other
nations followed suit, and the rate of smallpox infection really
dramatically started to drop. Resistance to vaccines continued to grow
as more nations began to require it. Nobel Prize winning
(24:32):
writer George Bernard Shaw, who caught smallpox in eighty one
in spite of having been vaccinated as a baby, called
vaccination quote a peculiarly filthy piece of witchcraft. Jenner had
thought the protection granted by childhood vaccination would last forever,
but that turned out to not be the case. And
really there were some real, verifiable problems with the earliest
(24:55):
vaccines because of the state of medical knowledge at the time.
They simply were not being made or given in a
way that was sterile or safe. There was no quality control,
there was no method of standardizing how much of the
virus a person got with any given vaccination. Plus, the
first vaccinations were often as the case was with the
orphans who were crossing the ocean. They were made from
(25:17):
arm to arm, from person to person, and that would
spread disease from the first person or wherever on down
the line. It wasn't until the eighteen forties that people
started instead passing the infection from cows to cows and
then mass producing the vaccine from cow material only, which
did cut down on some of the related bloodborne infections
(25:37):
that could be passed along. And unfortunately, Jenner's record also
was not perfect. Some of his conclusions, including the connection
to the grease disease and horses and the idea of
the immunity was permanent, proved to be false during his lifetime.
He had also written a study on the behavior of
newly hatched cuckoo birds that was correct, but wasn't proved
(25:58):
to be so until many years later. So people disbelieved
his conclusions and used that as another strike against him. Basically,
he said, you were wrong about this, And it wasn't
even kind of their argument. Father. It wasn't even just
that he was wrong. What he had what he had proven,
was basically that that newly hatched cuckoos will throw the
(26:18):
other eggs and other hatchlings out of the nest and
everybody thought they were not physically capable of doing that.
And so it was not only that they were like
you're wrong, Like you're wrong, and that's ridiculous, But in fact,
cuckoos are jerks. Cuckoos are jerks, and they do that
for real, and he had watched them do it with
his own eyes. Yeah. But basically anything that he said
(26:38):
or published that turned out to be wrong or was
believed to be wrong and not proven until later really
became fuel for the anti vaccination fire. Another big log
on that fire was that although he had many years
of medical training, he hadn't passed any kind of comprehensive
medical exam when he started doing his immunization work. Those
weren't compulsory when he went through his training, and the
(27:00):
fact that he hadn't passed the equivalent of the boards
became this huge bone of contention, and some people just
thought that vaccination wasn't necessary. They claimed that the rate
of smallpox decline was really just because of improvements in
general sanitation and hygiene as the rate dropped, which meant
that people felt less threatened by smallpox on a day
to day basis. Objection to vaccination became more and more vehement.
(27:25):
Patent medicine pushers and other quacks also started to deliberately
spread anti vaccine sentiments as those practices started to grow
in the eighteen hundreds. And there are some legitimate ethical
issues that surround vaccination, you know, some of which we've
talked about before earlier in this podcast. Compulsory vaccination was
viewed as wealthy people invading the privacy of poorer people
(27:47):
and robbing of them of their freedom of choice. And
some nations there were layers and layers and layers of
entangled religious and ethical considerations. In India, for example, there
was the fact that the vaccine came from cows, which
was symbolically sacred to many Hindus. The vaccine was also
being passed from person to person through a society that
(28:09):
had a really rigid cast system, and the whole thing
was wrapped up under this umbrella of British colonialism. So
as with the chain of human orphan carriers, that's a
whole lot of moral and ethical discussion to try to unpack. Yeah,
it's really problematic, and regardless of all of these considerations,
the end result was the only time ever in human
(28:31):
history that a contagious disease had been eradicated through the
efforts of human beings, so that almost adds another like
dicey layer of people being able to say, well, the
end justifies the means. But then there was also some
mythical weirdness along the way. Right, it becomes a really
complicated issue. Smallpox was eradicated in most of Europe and
North America by the nineteen fifties, but it was still
(28:54):
really prevalent in many other parts of the world at
that point. In nineteen sixty seven, the World Health Organizations
spearheaded and global vaccination effort, which was met with a
lot of skepticism. The vaccine and use at this point
was freeze dried. It was generally made from animal lymph,
and it was made too much, much, much higher standards
of quality control and purity and sanitation and everything else
(29:19):
than what was around in Dinner's time. We were not
just extracting material from sores and sticking it into people anymore,
which is still so the grossest gives to the wiggles uh.
In some regions, the goal was to vaccinate everyone, but
when that wasn't possible, they turned to a method that
was known as ring vaccination, and since smallpox spreads through
(29:40):
close contact rather than casual contacts, so you'd get it
from living in the same house with someone, but not
from walking past an infected person on the street. Uh,
the focus was on vaccinating people who came into close
contact with someone who had been exposed. So getting a
vaccine within three days of exposure dramatically decreases the likelihood
of getting smallpox, or it enables you to only get
(30:04):
a very light case of it. Yeah, So when there
would be a reported case of smallpox, they would sort
of come and immunize everyone around that person and cut
off this one infection vector, uh from spreading it to
other people. Had there been multiple stable strands of smallpox,
which there weren't, just really just one main one, or
(30:24):
if it had also been carried by animals, this whole
eradication attempt would have been a lot more difficult than
it was. And The last occurrence of the most serious
form of smallpox, known as very ala major, was in
Bangladesh in nineteen seventy five. The last naturally occurring case
of smallpox was in Somalia in ninety seven, and on
(30:47):
May eighth of nineteen eighty the World Health Organization declared
that the world was now free of smallpox. Like we said,
first and only time ever for that to happen. Yeah,
there have been some diseases that have kind of faded
from history thanks to changes in diet and sanitation and
that kind of thing. So they're diseases that used to
be common that really aren't anymore. But this is really
(31:08):
the only time that people have said we are going
to get rid of this disease and then did it.
There there are some others that are getting kind of
close to that point now, but as of right now, um,
which is October, smallpox is the only one, although it's
been eradicated and you know, you cannot generally get it
from another person unless that person has been infected in
(31:29):
some kind of lab accident. There are many nations that
maintain a stockpile of smallpox vaccine in case of a
biological weapon attack using smallpox. Right now, the only known
smallpox virus samples still in existence are in laboratories in
the United States and Russia, and every once in a while, uh,
everybody involved kind of re visits the idea about whether
(31:51):
we should destroy those The most recent conversations I've seen
about it are from twenty eleven. Um that like there
had been. Yes, we are destroying them as far back
as in the eighties, but they're still around um and
the most recent conversations about it. The recommendation is, you know,
there might actually be a need for us to have
intact uh samples of the original virus if there were
(32:14):
something like a terror attacked using small box. So that
remains to be discussed for a long time. I think yeah,
probably underlock and key. Uh. And the home that Jenner
had is today known as the Edward Jenner Museum. You
can visit it. You can visit it and see the
Temple of Vaccinia. I just love they called it that.
(32:36):
How do you do? It's sort of cute. So yes, uh.
We we got some questions about vaccination after we talked
about Elsa Manchester and that her mother not wanting her
to be vaccinated, and that kind of led me to
what how did how did I knew the basic story
was about Jenner and counts now I know a lot
more of it and how super gross it was. We
(33:00):
could have been way more graphic in our language in
this episode, and we mostly have not been because I
don't think I could stomach it. Yeah, we're not trying
to be gentle with you. We're trying to be gentle
with us. Yes, I can probably stomach it, but filling.
Do you have some listener mail that is not full
of biological yuck? No? Actually I have two pieces of
mail that is full of biological Yes, so are The
(33:24):
response we've gotten to our episodes about the Haunted Mansion
has been generally overwhelmingly positive that the people who have
not been positive are so angry. Yeah, super angry. Yeah,
I'm going to take the giant pile of love and
just told it close. Um. So the first thing this
(33:44):
is from Aubrey. Aubrey says, I just discovered your podcast.
Then I love it. As a stay at home mother
of three, I feel my brain has become mush and
this is so refreshing. While I was listening to the
Haunted Mansion episode, I was reminded of a friend of
mine whose family spread his ashes and the pirates of
the here being that Disneyland, it was a major in
All Caps ordeal. Of course, they're obviously watching everyone at
(34:08):
all times, and they caught them letting handfuls of ashes
into the water. They were told to stop while the
ride was going, and then the ride was shut down,
and then security stopped them, took them to private quarters
where they were told they could press charges against them
because it is illegal, and they were kicked out of
the parks and their annual passes which they could just purchase,
were removed with their refund and rightfully so, I have
(34:30):
been disturbed greatly ever since. When I ride Pirates, they
were told the water has to be drained and has
Matt has to come in to make a proper cleaning.
I'm not sure if this is true, but it's terrible,
So just thought i'd share that it's not just the
haunted mansion that is among the dead. Yeah, you know,
Disney's magical. Too many people Disneyland and Disney World, and
(34:52):
people really like the idea of spending eternity there in
their cremine state. And I understand that appealed it. Yeah,
you can't do it well. And I also think I'd
feel empathy with people for the decisions that they make
regarding you know that their deceased loved ones. Um. I
am a person who has spent exorbitant amounts on my
(35:13):
deceased cats. Um, but yeah, those are human remains, and
you don't really just want to have human remains around,
certainly not they're in a public place. Our other listener
mail is along a similar subject, So this is just
our bioas episodes from a cast. We got a lot
of great emails from cast member and this one gave
(35:34):
us some additional inside info on this problem. So we're
gonna keep this one anonymous because we don't want to
get her in trouble. Yeah with word. I've been listening
to your amazing podcast for over a year now and
have always wanted to write in, but have never had
anything that was interested enough to talk about. Considering that
I started listening to you guys to kill Tom on
my forty five minute ride to work at the Magic
(35:55):
Kingdom in Walt Disney World, I finally have my moment.
Living in the subculture that is being a cast member
is like living in a crazy parallel universe. It makes
complete sense that it took eighteen years for Disney to
open Haunted Mansion, considering that they've been talking about replacing
the Electric Light Grade with Spectro, which tends to be
more beloved and is sitting in storage for two years,
and never have because of technical delays. Cast member gossip
(36:19):
is usually about rumored lands or ride updates that will
probably never happen. There are so many creatives working in
the parks that ideas get really far in development and
then get shelved. In Part one, you commented that it
was kind of weird that in the nineteen fifties the
Haunted Mansion was going to be a home for English
ghosts from the war, which it totally is, but it's
also totally in the wist idea of the show of Disneyland.
(36:42):
As a cast member, we'd have meetings to talk about
maintaining show. Cinderella live in the castle at the age
of Main Street, across from Belle and Aerial. The wire
that comes out from the castle but tanker bell flies
on during the fireworks is Cinderella's clothesline for Charming's ESPN hookup.
The and You Ask the Country Bears love giving thirty
(37:03):
slightly strange shows every day and then they hibernate for
the night. Alice hangs out with the White Rabbit by
the Mad Tea Party, unless you're in Epcot, then she's
probably gone home to England. Any question that a guest asked,
has a preplanned answer and it's probably magical. Also, people
totally do dump ashes on ride. One of my roommates
(37:24):
worked at the Toy Story ride at Hollywood Studios and
they had a guest to dump their mother's ashes on
the ride. They had to stop, cycle everyone out of
the ride and deep clean. It makes a forty five
minute wait closer to three hours. Everyone gets angry, and
the ashes end up in a hazardous waste somewhere. I
love the show and everything you do. I'm sure you've
been asked before, but Walt's life would be amazing. It's
(37:46):
super long topic. And then she also sent some pictures
which are charming. Yes, and I have to say Toy
Story Midway Mania already has one of the longest lines
any of the parks, like the Way if you don't
have a fast pass, is often a couple of hours.
So the idea that you would add another three to
that because somebody did this, I can only imagine, like
(38:07):
the guest fury, and I'm sure they do not tell
guests that that's what's going on. So the poor cast
members that have to deal with people that are just
fury angry. Yes, and I understand the anger, especially if
it's hot, you are frustrated and probably thirsty. Yes, it's rough,
so public service announcement. Don't spread cremates like dumping of
(38:28):
cremated people or cremated anyone really is problematic and we'll
maybe cause there to have to be has that team, Yeah,
nobody wants that. Yes, So thank you both for these letters.
Thank you everyone for the We've gotten really just amazing, fantastic, excited,
delightful letters about this. And for those of you who
(38:48):
are really angry that we spent two episodes talking about
a carnival ride. Sorry about that. Uh, we have lots
of other episodes that are on lots of other things.
We have a pretty diverse as sort it. Like today
we're talking about death and disfigurement and you know, changing
the world, not to carnivally. Nope. If you would like
to write to us about this or anything else, we
(39:09):
are at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also
on Facebook at facebook dot com slash history class stuff
and on Twitter at miss in history our tumbler which
has just been zooming along in popularity lately, and I
thanks everyone who has contributed to that. That's at miss
in history dot tumbler dot com, and we are also
(39:29):
pinning things up on Pinterest. If you would like to
learn more about what we have talked about today, come
to our website and put the word smallpox in the
search bar. You will find the ten oldest known diseases,
of which smallpox is one. There may be someone there
that you were expecting to see, which it turns out,
are much more recent. You can learn about all that
(39:49):
and a whole lot more at our website, which is
how Stuff works dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics. Because it has to forks dot com.
(40:11):
This episode of Stuff you Missed in History Classes brought
to you by Linda dot com. You can learn it
at Linda dot com, an online learning company with more
than seventy seven thousand video tutorials to teach software, creative
and business skills. Membership starts at twenty five a month
and provides unlimited seven access to top quality video courses
taught by expert instructors with real world experience. Listeners of
(40:31):
Stuff you Missed in History class can trial Inda dot
com free for seven days by visiting Linda dot com
slash history stuff
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy Will, I'm Holly Front. They were going
to talk about smallpox, super fun topics. Well, and it's
(00:21):
been pretty much gone for long enough that I think
most people don't really have a sense of just what
it was like. Like, I think the closest equivalent most
people have today's chicken pox. But even if that doesn't
touch it in terms of horrifying this No, even now
that we have chicken pox vaccine, a lot of people
have never experienced chicken pox. And I coincidentally never got
(00:43):
chicken pox. What Yeah, I had to be vaccinated for
it as I grown up because I never got it
as a child, neither did my brother. So smallpox it's
not like super chicken pox. It's been around for longer
than recorded history, and it probably originated in Africa more
than ten thousand years ago, and it spread around the
(01:04):
world following migration and trade. We have physical evidence that
it existed as far back as six b C, thanks
to the mummified head of Ramsey's the Fifth, which has
evidence of smallpox physically. It was also described in writing
in China and India at about the same time. But
based on all that knowledge, it's pretty clear that smallpox
(01:28):
existed before writing did. Yeah, and there are several types
of smallpox, and there are there's a range of possible
complications that can come from it, but in general, uh,
it causes these small, pus filled lesions on the skin,
and people that have it also get a fever normally
and other flu like symptoms. And when it existed in
(01:50):
the wild, uh, it was fatal and roughly of all
cases for babies, that number was between eight and so
a really high mortality rate. And in the eighteenth century,
as much as ten percent of the population of Europe
died of smallpox every year, and more than three d
million people died of smallpox during the twentieth century. Those
(02:12):
are numbers that I bet people were not expecting. No,
they're pretty enormous. Yeah, that's a lot of people. Yeah,
it's a contagious disease and once somebody had it, there
was really not anything that could be done. Most treatments
that people tried did not have any real medical value.
One was called the red treatment, which was basically surrounding
the patient with the color red, but the patient did
(02:33):
have to be clean, fed and cared for until the
scabs fell off, and that was a few weeks after
the pox started to form. Smallpox was contagious that entire time,
so it spread really easily among families, caregivers, and other
people who were living in close quarters, and the people
that survived having smallpox often had extensive and disfiguring scarring.
(02:56):
There were actually etiquette manuals that offered advice on how
to word a condolence letter to your friend after her
lovely face had been horribly disfigured and scarred by smallpox.
Many survivors also faced other complications, including blindness, and before
it's eradication, smallpox actually caused more blindness than any other condition.
(03:17):
So this disease killed royalty, It changed lines of succession,
It struck down armies in the field, and shifted the
tide of battle. An epidemic near the end of the
Roman Empire killed almost seven million people, and when it
was introduced into the America's it devastated the native population,
and it was also spread to native people's on purpose
(03:38):
as a form of germ warfare during the French and
Indian War. It was so influential and terrifying. That many
polytheistic religions have gods of smallpox, and there are Christian
saints and martyrs associated with it and its victims as well.
So smallpox was a disease deeply dreaded and feared and
it did not mess around. But one and gets the
(04:01):
credit thankfully changed all of this, and that was Edward Jenner.
And he's the topic of most of this podcast. Yeah,
but before we talk about him, we kind of need
to talk about like the state of the world before
he came along. We've talked a little bit about the
germ theory of disease and how it did not really
start to spread around the United States and Europe until
(04:22):
the eighteen hundreds, but people weren't completely clueless about ideas
like contagiousness and immunity before this point. People knew that
if you were around someone who had smallpox for a
long time, you would probably get it too. And for
more than two thousand years, people have also known that
a person who had survived smallpox wasn't likely to get
it again, So smallpox survivors were tapped often to care
(04:46):
for the sick because they appeared to be protected. So
it's not really a far jump from those two ideas
to the thought that maybe you could give somebody smallpox
on purpose so that they would be immune later, sort
of how like the vaccine. Sometimes parents would send their
kids to play with somebody who had chicken pox to
get it over with. I guess they're probably parents who
(05:07):
don't want to immunize their children who still do this,
but it would take a lot more efforts, since chicken
boxes a lot more rare now. Yeah, And that was
often done, especially with young children, because allegedly, if you
get chicken pox younger less horrible than if you get
it older. Getting chicken pox as an adult can be
extremely horribly painful, which is why I have had a vaccine.
(05:30):
So the thing is that for the most part, this
whole method of um of exposing to somebody to smallpox
on purpose actually a whole lot grosser than chicken pox parties.
Oh yeah. The earliest attempts to deal with this happened
in China at least a thousand years ago, but in
sixteen seventy traders introduced the practice to the Ottoman Empire,
(05:54):
where it started to progress to other nations. Sometimes it
was as simple as deliberately exposing yourself to someone with
a relatively mild case of the disease. But a more
direct method and also the grosser one, was to use
a needle or a lancet to extract matter from an
infected person smallpox lesions and put it under the scan
(06:15):
of a healthy person. Sometimes the material would be dried
out or stored at room temperature for a while so
it wasn't as lethal as fresh material. And another method
was to inhale dried material from a smallpox lesion or
a crushed up smallpox gab. Yeah, I know this sounds
just terrible. It sounds like the sort of thing that
(06:36):
we would hear about on saw bones that we keep
mentioning is is like a thing that's just a terrible idea,
but that actually worked. Yeah. After this exposure, the healthy
person would usually wind up with a case of smallpox
that was less severe than if it had been caught naturally.
So you can see where there would be a certain
appeal to this concept, like I will at least control
my exposure and hopefully get a mild version rather than
(06:58):
just cross my fingers and wait for the really horrible
case of smallpox to his for disfigurement, blindness, and death.
This practice became known as both inoculation and vary elation.
So inoculation is from a Latin word meaning to graft
or to implants, so think of like grafting a bud
from one tree to another. Vary Elation comes from bariola,
(07:20):
which is the name for the virus that causes smallpox,
and then bariola comes from Latin words meaning spots or pimples.
And the practice of vary elation spread first through India, China,
and Africa, and by the eighteenth century it had made
its way to Europe as well. It was slow to
catch on though, uh In the early eighteenth century, Edward
Wortley Montague was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and while
(07:44):
he was there, his wife, Lady Mary Worley Montague, whose
face had been scarred from her own bout of smallpox,
learned about vary elation. But in seventeen eighteen she ordered
the embassy surgeon to perform variolation on her son. This
procedure was successful and she had her daughter inoculated in
seventeen twenty one. After they got back to London. The
(08:06):
medical community in England was not too sure about all this,
so naturally, the next people who are very elated were prisoners.
We've discussed the previous podcasts that there are times when
people say it's not so much risk to use a
prisoner or a criminal, let's just put them at risk. Yeah,
there there are many ethical considerations in the history of
(08:27):
small box. But from the air and some successful experimentation,
the practice spread through the English aristocracy and into the
rest of Europe. Vary elation made its way to the
America's shortly thereafter. Reverend Cotton Mather and Dr Zabdial Wolfston
used it to try to curb a smallpox epidemic in
Boston in seventy one. About half of Boston's population got
(08:53):
the uh got the virus. During this outbreak. About fourteen
percent of those who got it naturally died, and that
compared to two percent of the people who had been
vary elated. So Math and Boilston documented all of their
progress and with these results that showed that it was
overall of success. You know, variolating people was way less
(09:14):
deadly than getting smallpox naturally. The practice started to become
more common on both sides of the Atlantic, and variolation worked,
but it was not foolproof. People still died as we
just mentioned, and survivors uh still had scars after they recovered.
Sometimes a very elated patient would spread smallpox to other people,
(09:36):
accidentally causing an outbreak anyway, and other diseases like syphilis, hepatitis,
and scrofula, which is usually caused by the same bacterium
that causes tuberculosis, could also be transmitted during this variolation process. Overall,
varilation was about eight percent effective and it had a
two percent mortality rate, so it was better than getting
(09:57):
smallpox the normal way. There was still a lot of
room for improvement, and that leads us to Edward Jenner.
He was born on May seventeen, seventeen forty nine in Barkley, Gloucestershire.
He was the eighth of nine children, and he went
to live with his brother after being orphaned at the
age of five. In seventeen fifty seven, when he was
(10:17):
eight years old, he was inoculated for smallpox. He started
an apprenticeship when he was in his early teens, working
with a surgeon and apothecary named Daniel Ludlow. He was
Lidlow's apprentice for several years and as the story goes,
it was while there that he heard a dairymaid say
that she would never get smallpox because she had had
cow pox. Cow Pox, like smallpox, is a virus. Cows
(10:41):
get it and it causes them to get these sores
on their utters. People who came in contact with these
sores while they were milking could get cow pox from
the cow, and it would cause similar sores on their
hands and lower arms. This was normally a really mild disease,
and the idea that someone who had had cow pox
before would not also get smallpox was either conventional wisdom
(11:02):
or country superstition, depending on who you asked. And in
addition to all that, milk needs were reputed to have
extremely beautiful complexions. They are the subjects of poems because
of their lovely skin, presumably because none of them had
smallpox scars. Jenner continued to study medicine and surgery for
the next several years, apprenticing with George Harwick in seventeen
(11:23):
sixty four and with John Hunter at St. George's Hospital
in London after he turned twenty one, And in addition
to his interest in medicine, uh Jenner was also adept
at other areas of science. He studied and observed animals,
He collected fossils, and he helped classify newly documented specimens.
He also something of a renaissance man, liked to play
(11:44):
the violin and write poems. And as we have in
a practice we have alluded to previously in a recent episode,
he was a balloonist, and he built and flew his
own hydrogen balloon. Ballooning was all the rage at this point. Uh,
And in seventy six he decided to try experiment, building
off the idea that cow pox granted immunity from smallpox.
(12:05):
What if, as with vary elation, you could deliberately give
someone cow pox. So a dairy maid named Sarah Elms
came to see Jenner about the sore that she had
on her hand, and he examined her, said it looked
like cow pox, and she confirmed that one of the
cows that she milked had recently had cow pox. And
(12:26):
the cow that gave Sarah smallpox was named Blossom. Blossom
skin is actually on display in the University of London
Library at St George's Hospital. It was removed for restoration
in and replaced in August. UH. She was a Gloucester cow,
which has horns in both the males and the females.
(12:47):
So if you see the pictures of the skin, it
has horns on it, which some people who are not
used to seeing female cows with horns maybe confusing. Yeah,
I think it's kind of darling that her name was
Blossom and a little morbid than skin is still on
display in a museum. It's such a wonderfully morbid thing.
So Jenner extracted material from this sore and he used
(13:10):
it to inoculate an eight year old boy named James Fips,
and he was the son of Jenner's gardener. So what
he did was he scratched James's arm and he rubbed
the material from Sarah's sore into it. James went through
a range of mild flu like symptoms and then he recovered.
A couple of months later, Jenner inoculated James again, this
(13:32):
time with fresh material from a smallpox sore. When James
didn't get smallpox, Jenner concluded that his experiment was in
fact a success. He decided to call his method vaccination
from the Latin words for cow and cow pox. So
before we talk about how this wound up radically changing
the world. We would be remiss if we didn't talk
about some of the other people who had come to
(13:54):
the same conclusion at about the same time. Twenty two
years earlier, an affluent tenant farmer named ben Jamin Jesti
had performed this same basic procedure on his wife and
his two sons during a smallpox outbreak in their area.
He had gotten the idea because he and two of
his milk maids had all had cow pox before, and
neither none of them had ever gotten smallpox in spite
(14:15):
of being exposed to it repeatedly. Jest took his wife
and two children to a field where some cows were
infected with cow pox, and he used a stocking needle
to transfer some material from the cow sores to their
arms his wife are. His wife's arm became infected and
she almost lost it, but all three of his family
members came through the outbreak without being infected. His sons
(14:38):
were inoculated with smallpox later on and had no reaction,
and they were all exposed to smallpox multiple times afterwards.
The ever got it despite the arm infection. It was
as successful though unsettling operations yes, and Jesti was the
target of all kinds of derision and scorn in his
community because of what he had done, and while word
(15:01):
did spread of his actions in the local medical community,
there's no written evidence that Jenner ever heard about it.
A schoolmaster named Peter Plett also put cow pox to
similar use in Holstein, Germany in sevente using material from
a cow on his employers two daughters. They were the
only children to survive an epidemic that struck three years later,
(15:22):
but one of them also had a strong enough reaction
when he did this experiment that he didn't go further
with the idea. A third man, John Fuster, was a
very elation practitioner, and in seventeen sixty three he vary
related two brothers, and one of them, who turned out
to have had cow pox before, didn't have any reaction.
So his brother got smallpox in a mild form, but
(15:45):
nothing happened to him. So consequently Fuster wondered if cow
pox might prevent smallpox, and he wrote a paper on
the idea that he never published. He made some attempts
at inoculating people with cow pox at roughly the same
time as Jenner made his first attempts, although it's really
unclear as to whether he and Jenner, who did know
(16:05):
each other, ever talked about it. So then we sort
of get to the question of what separates Jenner from
these men and what earned him the nickname of Father
of immunology, and it's that he made vaccination his life's work. Yeah,
there's been several articles that have come out in the
last ten or fifteen years that are sort of like,
Jenner doesn't deserve this title. So and So did it
(16:26):
twenty years before he did. And while it is true
that he wasn't the first person ever in history to
try this thing, he absolutely devoted himself to trying to
uh to to protect as many people as possible from
smallpox using cowpox from this point on, so much so
that his other medical practice actually started to suffer. The
(16:48):
first thing that he did was that he submitted a
paper to the Royal Society in sev but it was
rejected and he got a note from the society's president
that he really should be concerned about his reputation. So
taking that into consideration, he repeated his experiment a few times,
and then he wrote up an Inquiry into the Causes
and Effects of the very La Vaccinate, A disease discovered
(17:11):
in some of the western counties of England, particularly Gloucestershire,
and known by the name of cow pox. Just a
lengthy title for a paper. I love the lengthy paper title.
You can read this one online for free. Yeah. And
that paper detailed his theories about the origins of cow pox.
He thought it came from a horse ailment which is
casually called Greece, which was later disproved, and he listed
(17:33):
a number of case studies involving cow pox and smallpox immunity.
He published his paper, financing it himself the next year.
So the response to his publication and his ongoing vaccination
work was mixed at best. People were really reluctant to
believe that what he was proposing could work. Cow Pox
was also not a really prevalent illness, especially in towns
(17:56):
and cities, which made it kind of hard to get
the material people needed to make backs nations. Uh. One
of the things about variolation was that there was smallpox everywhere.
You could easily get smallpox to inoculate other people with.
Not so much so with cow pox because precautions like
hand washing and sterilization we're not being used yet. Sometimes
(18:17):
cow pox vaccines would become adulterated with smallpox through cross
contamination that would make it look like a person had
gotten smallpox from their cow pox vaccine, and people who
made money off of variolation who are super opposed to
Jenner's idea, as you can imagine, it would be a
natural response. People also objected to vaccination on religious grounds
(18:40):
or because they believe that cows were lesser than humans
and so that humans should not be contaminated with material
from cows. Clergy would speak against the idea of quote
contaminating humans with a substance from a sick animal. The
Anti Vaccine Society published a satirical cartoon called the cow
poc or The Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation, And
(19:02):
this was a drawing of a group of people all
being vaccinated and they were all growing cow heads out
of their bodies. This was drawn by British satirist James Gilray.
A year after Jenner had published his pamphlet, he conducted
a survey to try to conclusively prove that cowpox did
in fact confer smallpox immunity. Only once that was done,
(19:22):
with the answer being a pretty decisive yes, it does.
In fact confer small pox immunity. Did vaccination gradually begin
to gain acceptance, And we're gonna talk about how has
changed the world in a minute, but first we're gonna
talk about Jenner's personal life before we get to that point.
It's a lot of what really was successful happened after
he died in seventy eight. He got married and he
(19:44):
eventually had four children. They built a cottage in the
garden where he would give free vaccinations to poor children,
and he called this the Temple of Vaccinia. Jenner would
give vaccine to anybody who asked him for it for free,
so the actual vaccination work was carried out by many
other people. He started to call himself the vaccine Clerk
(20:04):
to the world, and he developed new ways to collect
and preserve cowpox material for the vaccines. Jenner put so
much effort into vaccination that his own medical practices Tracy
mentioned earlier, really started to fail. Around the start of
the nineteenth century, Jenner gradually started to pull away from
public life. His work had drawn huge praise, but it
(20:26):
had also gotten a whole lot of judgment and scorned
from people who feared what he was doing or questioned
his practices. He received quite a number of awards and
honors for his work, including several honorary degrees, and he
received a medal from Napoleon in eighteen o four, and
Napoleon so respected him that he was able to negotiate
(20:46):
the release of British prisoners of war during the Napoleonic Wars.
Statues have been erected in Jenner's honor all over the world.
Parliament granted Jenner ten thousand pounds in eighteen o two
for his vaccination work, and that was followed by another
twenty thousand pounds five years later, and this is millions
of today's dollars. Vaccination gradually started to overtake variolation in popularity,
(21:11):
and in eighteen forty England prohibited variolation outright, since the
vaccination was had at this point proved to be much safer,
and this sparked protests from people who objected to vaccination
for one reason or another and wanted to have variolation
available as a choice. Tragically, although Jenner did so much
work to stop the spread of smallpox at the time,
(21:33):
tuberculosis was still a very common and deadly illness, and
it also was not particularly treatable. He lost his oldest
son to tuberculosis in eighteen ten and his wife in
eighteen fifteen, and he had other deaths in his family
in the intervening years. Edward Jenner did not, as was
his custom, come down for breakfast on January eighteen twenty three,
(21:57):
and he was found in his room having had a
massive stroke. Uh. He died shortly thereafter on January. And
really at this point his legacy was just at its
earliest stages. And we're going to talk about that in
just a moment, but first we will take a minute
and talk about So now let's get back to how
really the groundwork that Edward Dinner laid actually changed the world. Yeah,
(22:23):
as we mentioned before, although other people had made this
same discovery that Jenner did, and even earlier than he had,
it was still Jenner's tireless work that really started the
world on a path to eradicating smallpox. It is, at
least as of when we are recording this, the only
disease that mankind has eradicated from the planet. Uh. Currently,
the only samples of it that remain are in laboratories.
(22:47):
Vaccination was pretty prevalent in Europe by eighteen hundred in
eighteen oh three and really just one of my favorite
stories that maybe we will do whole episode on later.
Francisco Xavier to Balmus, acting on behalf of King Charles
the Fourth, started an expedition from Spain to South America
via the Canary Islands, and the goal of this expedition
(23:07):
was to deliver vaccine to South America and Asia. So
at this point, the preservation methods that were used to
h to make the vaccine just they couldn't keep it
potent over such a long and hot voyage. So they
had to come up with a different method, which was
that they rounded up twenty two orphans who had never
(23:28):
had cowpox or smallpox and used them as a chain
of human carriers to allow the vaccine to reach the Caribbean.
There are many ethical employee implications of this practice, simultaneously
ingenious and a little spine chilling. Yeah. So basically they would,
you know, infect one person before the voyage started and
(23:48):
then pass it from person to person as they crossed
the sea. So so many moral layers to what we
were talking about. I cannot even scratch the surface of
it with my my pitiful moral attempts. But in eighteen
o seven, Bavarians became the first to require military recruits
(24:09):
to be vaccinated for smallpox, since troop movements had always
been a major factor in the spread of the disease.
In eighteen fifty three, England made smallpox vaccination compulsory. Other
nations followed suit, and the rate of smallpox infection really
dramatically started to drop. Resistance to vaccines continued to grow
as more nations began to require it. Nobel Prize winning
(24:32):
writer George Bernard Shaw, who caught smallpox in eighty one
in spite of having been vaccinated as a baby, called
vaccination quote a peculiarly filthy piece of witchcraft. Jenner had
thought the protection granted by childhood vaccination would last forever,
but that turned out to not be the case. And
really there were some real, verifiable problems with the earliest
(24:55):
vaccines because of the state of medical knowledge at the time.
They simply were not being made or given in a
way that was sterile or safe. There was no quality control,
there was no method of standardizing how much of the
virus a person got with any given vaccination. Plus, the
first vaccinations were often as the case was with the
orphans who were crossing the ocean. They were made from
(25:17):
arm to arm, from person to person, and that would
spread disease from the first person or wherever on down
the line. It wasn't until the eighteen forties that people
started instead passing the infection from cows to cows and
then mass producing the vaccine from cow material only, which
did cut down on some of the related bloodborne infections
(25:37):
that could be passed along. And unfortunately, Jenner's record also
was not perfect. Some of his conclusions, including the connection
to the grease disease and horses and the idea of
the immunity was permanent, proved to be false during his lifetime.
He had also written a study on the behavior of
newly hatched cuckoo birds that was correct, but wasn't proved
(25:58):
to be so until many years later. So people disbelieved
his conclusions and used that as another strike against him. Basically,
he said, you were wrong about this, And it wasn't
even kind of their argument. Father. It wasn't even just
that he was wrong. What he had what he had proven,
was basically that that newly hatched cuckoos will throw the
(26:18):
other eggs and other hatchlings out of the nest and
everybody thought they were not physically capable of doing that.
And so it was not only that they were like
you're wrong, Like you're wrong, and that's ridiculous, But in fact,
cuckoos are jerks. Cuckoos are jerks, and they do that
for real, and he had watched them do it with
his own eyes. Yeah. But basically anything that he said
(26:38):
or published that turned out to be wrong or was
believed to be wrong and not proven until later really
became fuel for the anti vaccination fire. Another big log
on that fire was that although he had many years
of medical training, he hadn't passed any kind of comprehensive
medical exam when he started doing his immunization work. Those
weren't compulsory when he went through his training, and the
(27:00):
fact that he hadn't passed the equivalent of the boards
became this huge bone of contention, and some people just
thought that vaccination wasn't necessary. They claimed that the rate
of smallpox decline was really just because of improvements in
general sanitation and hygiene as the rate dropped, which meant
that people felt less threatened by smallpox on a day
to day basis. Objection to vaccination became more and more vehement.
(27:25):
Patent medicine pushers and other quacks also started to deliberately
spread anti vaccine sentiments as those practices started to grow
in the eighteen hundreds. And there are some legitimate ethical
issues that surround vaccination, you know, some of which we've
talked about before earlier in this podcast. Compulsory vaccination was
viewed as wealthy people invading the privacy of poorer people
(27:47):
and robbing of them of their freedom of choice. And
some nations there were layers and layers and layers of
entangled religious and ethical considerations. In India, for example, there
was the fact that the vaccine came from cows, which
was symbolically sacred to many Hindus. The vaccine was also
being passed from person to person through a society that
(28:09):
had a really rigid cast system, and the whole thing
was wrapped up under this umbrella of British colonialism. So
as with the chain of human orphan carriers, that's a
whole lot of moral and ethical discussion to try to unpack. Yeah,
it's really problematic, and regardless of all of these considerations,
the end result was the only time ever in human
(28:31):
history that a contagious disease had been eradicated through the
efforts of human beings, so that almost adds another like
dicey layer of people being able to say, well, the
end justifies the means. But then there was also some
mythical weirdness along the way. Right, it becomes a really
complicated issue. Smallpox was eradicated in most of Europe and
North America by the nineteen fifties, but it was still
(28:54):
really prevalent in many other parts of the world at
that point. In nineteen sixty seven, the World Health Organizations
spearheaded and global vaccination effort, which was met with a
lot of skepticism. The vaccine and use at this point
was freeze dried. It was generally made from animal lymph,
and it was made too much, much, much higher standards
of quality control and purity and sanitation and everything else
(29:19):
than what was around in Dinner's time. We were not
just extracting material from sores and sticking it into people anymore,
which is still so the grossest gives to the wiggles uh.
In some regions, the goal was to vaccinate everyone, but
when that wasn't possible, they turned to a method that
was known as ring vaccination, and since smallpox spreads through
(29:40):
close contact rather than casual contacts, so you'd get it
from living in the same house with someone, but not
from walking past an infected person on the street. Uh,
the focus was on vaccinating people who came into close
contact with someone who had been exposed. So getting a
vaccine within three days of exposure dramatically decreases the likelihood
of getting smallpox, or it enables you to only get
(30:04):
a very light case of it. Yeah, So when there
would be a reported case of smallpox, they would sort
of come and immunize everyone around that person and cut
off this one infection vector, uh from spreading it to
other people. Had there been multiple stable strands of smallpox,
which there weren't, just really just one main one, or
(30:24):
if it had also been carried by animals, this whole
eradication attempt would have been a lot more difficult than
it was. And The last occurrence of the most serious
form of smallpox, known as very ala major, was in
Bangladesh in nineteen seventy five. The last naturally occurring case
of smallpox was in Somalia in ninety seven, and on
(30:47):
May eighth of nineteen eighty the World Health Organization declared
that the world was now free of smallpox. Like we said,
first and only time ever for that to happen. Yeah,
there have been some diseases that have kind of faded
from history thanks to changes in diet and sanitation and
that kind of thing. So they're diseases that used to
be common that really aren't anymore. But this is really
(31:08):
the only time that people have said we are going
to get rid of this disease and then did it.
There there are some others that are getting kind of
close to that point now, but as of right now, um,
which is October, smallpox is the only one, although it's
been eradicated and you know, you cannot generally get it
from another person unless that person has been infected in
(31:29):
some kind of lab accident. There are many nations that
maintain a stockpile of smallpox vaccine in case of a
biological weapon attack using smallpox. Right now, the only known
smallpox virus samples still in existence are in laboratories in
the United States and Russia, and every once in a while, uh,
everybody involved kind of re visits the idea about whether
(31:51):
we should destroy those The most recent conversations I've seen
about it are from twenty eleven. Um that like there
had been. Yes, we are destroying them as far back
as in the eighties, but they're still around um and
the most recent conversations about it. The recommendation is, you know,
there might actually be a need for us to have
intact uh samples of the original virus if there were
(32:14):
something like a terror attacked using small box. So that
remains to be discussed for a long time. I think yeah,
probably underlock and key. Uh. And the home that Jenner
had is today known as the Edward Jenner Museum. You
can visit it. You can visit it and see the
Temple of Vaccinia. I just love they called it that.
(32:36):
How do you do? It's sort of cute. So yes, uh.
We we got some questions about vaccination after we talked
about Elsa Manchester and that her mother not wanting her
to be vaccinated, and that kind of led me to
what how did how did I knew the basic story
was about Jenner and counts now I know a lot
more of it and how super gross it was. We
(33:00):
could have been way more graphic in our language in
this episode, and we mostly have not been because I
don't think I could stomach it. Yeah, we're not trying
to be gentle with you. We're trying to be gentle
with us. Yes, I can probably stomach it, but filling.
Do you have some listener mail that is not full
of biological yuck? No? Actually I have two pieces of
mail that is full of biological Yes, so are The
(33:24):
response we've gotten to our episodes about the Haunted Mansion
has been generally overwhelmingly positive that the people who have
not been positive are so angry. Yeah, super angry. Yeah,
I'm going to take the giant pile of love and
just told it close. Um. So the first thing this
(33:44):
is from Aubrey. Aubrey says, I just discovered your podcast.
Then I love it. As a stay at home mother
of three, I feel my brain has become mush and
this is so refreshing. While I was listening to the
Haunted Mansion episode, I was reminded of a friend of
mine whose family spread his ashes and the pirates of
the here being that Disneyland, it was a major in
All Caps ordeal. Of course, they're obviously watching everyone at
(34:08):
all times, and they caught them letting handfuls of ashes
into the water. They were told to stop while the
ride was going, and then the ride was shut down,
and then security stopped them, took them to private quarters
where they were told they could press charges against them
because it is illegal, and they were kicked out of
the parks and their annual passes which they could just purchase,
were removed with their refund and rightfully so, I have
(34:30):
been disturbed greatly ever since. When I ride Pirates, they
were told the water has to be drained and has
Matt has to come in to make a proper cleaning.
I'm not sure if this is true, but it's terrible,
So just thought i'd share that it's not just the
haunted mansion that is among the dead. Yeah, you know,
Disney's magical. Too many people Disneyland and Disney World, and
(34:52):
people really like the idea of spending eternity there in
their cremine state. And I understand that appealed it. Yeah,
you can't do it well. And I also think I'd
feel empathy with people for the decisions that they make
regarding you know that their deceased loved ones. Um. I
am a person who has spent exorbitant amounts on my
(35:13):
deceased cats. Um, but yeah, those are human remains, and
you don't really just want to have human remains around,
certainly not they're in a public place. Our other listener
mail is along a similar subject, So this is just
our bioas episodes from a cast. We got a lot
of great emails from cast member and this one gave
(35:34):
us some additional inside info on this problem. So we're
gonna keep this one anonymous because we don't want to
get her in trouble. Yeah with word. I've been listening
to your amazing podcast for over a year now and
have always wanted to write in, but have never had
anything that was interested enough to talk about. Considering that
I started listening to you guys to kill Tom on
my forty five minute ride to work at the Magic
(35:55):
Kingdom in Walt Disney World, I finally have my moment.
Living in the subculture that is being a cast member
is like living in a crazy parallel universe. It makes
complete sense that it took eighteen years for Disney to
open Haunted Mansion, considering that they've been talking about replacing
the Electric Light Grade with Spectro, which tends to be
more beloved and is sitting in storage for two years,
and never have because of technical delays. Cast member gossip
(36:19):
is usually about rumored lands or ride updates that will
probably never happen. There are so many creatives working in
the parks that ideas get really far in development and
then get shelved. In Part one, you commented that it
was kind of weird that in the nineteen fifties the
Haunted Mansion was going to be a home for English
ghosts from the war, which it totally is, but it's
also totally in the wist idea of the show of Disneyland.
(36:42):
As a cast member, we'd have meetings to talk about
maintaining show. Cinderella live in the castle at the age
of Main Street, across from Belle and Aerial. The wire
that comes out from the castle but tanker bell flies
on during the fireworks is Cinderella's clothesline for Charming's ESPN hookup.
The and You Ask the Country Bears love giving thirty
(37:03):
slightly strange shows every day and then they hibernate for
the night. Alice hangs out with the White Rabbit by
the Mad Tea Party, unless you're in Epcot, then she's
probably gone home to England. Any question that a guest asked,
has a preplanned answer and it's probably magical. Also, people
totally do dump ashes on ride. One of my roommates
(37:24):
worked at the Toy Story ride at Hollywood Studios and
they had a guest to dump their mother's ashes on
the ride. They had to stop, cycle everyone out of
the ride and deep clean. It makes a forty five
minute wait closer to three hours. Everyone gets angry, and
the ashes end up in a hazardous waste somewhere. I
love the show and everything you do. I'm sure you've
been asked before, but Walt's life would be amazing. It's
(37:46):
super long topic. And then she also sent some pictures
which are charming. Yes, and I have to say Toy
Story Midway Mania already has one of the longest lines
any of the parks, like the Way if you don't
have a fast pass, is often a couple of hours.
So the idea that you would add another three to
that because somebody did this, I can only imagine, like
(38:07):
the guest fury, and I'm sure they do not tell
guests that that's what's going on. So the poor cast
members that have to deal with people that are just
fury angry. Yes, and I understand the anger, especially if
it's hot, you are frustrated and probably thirsty. Yes, it's rough,
so public service announcement. Don't spread cremates like dumping of
(38:28):
cremated people or cremated anyone really is problematic and we'll
maybe cause there to have to be has that team, Yeah,
nobody wants that. Yes, So thank you both for these letters.
Thank you everyone for the We've gotten really just amazing, fantastic, excited,
delightful letters about this. And for those of you who
(38:48):
are really angry that we spent two episodes talking about
a carnival ride. Sorry about that. Uh, we have lots
of other episodes that are on lots of other things.
We have a pretty diverse as sort it. Like today
we're talking about death and disfigurement and you know, changing
the world, not to carnivally. Nope. If you would like
to write to us about this or anything else, we
(39:09):
are at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also
on Facebook at facebook dot com slash history class stuff
and on Twitter at miss in history our tumbler which
has just been zooming along in popularity lately, and I
thanks everyone who has contributed to that. That's at miss
in history dot tumbler dot com, and we are also
(39:29):
pinning things up on Pinterest. If you would like to
learn more about what we have talked about today, come
to our website and put the word smallpox in the
search bar. You will find the ten oldest known diseases,
of which smallpox is one. There may be someone there
that you were expecting to see, which it turns out,
are much more recent. You can learn about all that
(39:49):
and a whole lot more at our website, which is
how Stuff works dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics. Because it has to forks dot com.
(40:11):
This episode of Stuff you Missed in History Classes brought
to you by Linda dot com. You can learn it
at Linda dot com, an online learning company with more
than seventy seven thousand video tutorials to teach software, creative
and business skills. Membership starts at twenty five a month
and provides unlimited seven access to top quality video courses
taught by expert instructors with real world experience. Listeners of
(40:31):
Stuff you Missed in History class can trial Inda dot
com free for seven days by visiting Linda dot com
slash history stuff
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.