smallpox

• 
• SOURCE: Nature
  12/5/2022
  

  How Smallpox Inoculation Brought a New Nation Together

  The need to control smallpox outbreaks helped a public-minded spirit of disease prevention to override rampant individualism in the years surrounding the American Revolution, argues historian Andrew Wehrman.

• 
• 2/13/2022
  

  The First Smallpox Vaccinator in the 1780s Got Abuse Instead of Thanks

  by Rod Tanchanco

  Benjamin Jesty correctly intuited that exposing himself and his family to cowpox could shield them from the recurrent smallpox pandemics of England. Twenty years ahead of Edward Jenner, he became a local pariah. 

• 
• SOURCE: Governing
  8/5/2021
  

  The Long History of Vaccine Mandates

  by Lindsay M. Chervinsky

  President Biden's recent call for mandatory vaccination for federal workers follows the precedent set by George Washington's order to inoculate the Continental Army for smallpox.

• 
• 6/6/2021
  

  Paying People to Get Vaccines is an Old Idea Whose Time has Come Again

  by Margaret DeLacy

  John Haygarth devised a system for rewarding working-class residents of Chester for receiving the risky smallpox inoculation and maintaining social distance afterward. The effort was largely superseded by the more effective and safer Jenner vaccination, but was a foundational public health experiment that pays dividends today.

• 
• SOURCE: History.com
  4/9/2021
  

  The First ‘Vaccine Passports’ Were Scars from Smallpox Vaccinations

  Faced with unreliable and falsifiable documentation, public health authorities at the turn of the 20th century demanded physical proof of vaccination: the scarring left by the early technique, says smallpox historian Michael Willrich.

• 
• 3/14/2021
  

  Remembering the Father of Vaccination

  by Richard Gunderman

  "Whether or not Jenner truly saved more lives than any other person, there is no doubt that his pioneering work on immunization laid the groundwork for today’s most effective tool against COVID-19, the vaccine."

• 
• 2/21/2021
  

  Who Deserves Credit for Inventing Vaccination? And Why Does it Matter Today?

  by John Rhodes

  Historical honesty requires acknowledging the African and Asian inoculation practices that preceded and enabled Edward Jenner's smallpox vaccine. Telling this story more broadly might also encourage vulnerable communities of color to embrace the COVID vaccine.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  12/15/2020
  

  The African Roots of Inoculation in America: Saving Lives for Three Centuries

  by Gillian Brockell

  Knowledge carried by enslaved Africans supported rudimentary efforts at inoculation against smallpox in colonial Massachusetts.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  12/12/2020
  

  ‘A Fearsome Decision’: Abigail Adams Had Her Children Inoculated Against Smallpox

  Abigail Adams had justifiable fears of the primitive smallpox inoculation available in 1776, but larger fears of the disease. 

• 
• SOURCE: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
  10/18/2020
  

  Last Week Tonight: The World Health Organization

  The weekly comedy-investigative program includes an assessment of the World Health Organization's past work eradicating disease in the developing world and the Trump administration's attacks on the agency (includes some vulgar language and jokes).

• 
• 6/7/2020
  

  Mourning in America

  by Ed Simon

  Historically the powerful have described deaths from disease and starvation as "natural" to hide the political nature of suffering and their own responsibility. To mourn is to fight this erasure.

• 
• SOURCE: The Conversation
  6/1/2020
  

  George Washington Would Have So Worn a Mask

  by Maurizio Valsana

  The genre “What would X do?” – where X stands for a noted figure in history, say Jesus or Dolly Parton – is silly. And yet, as a scholar writing a new biography of George Washington, I can’t help making a bold declaration: The Father of His Country would wear his mask in public.

• 
• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  3/30/2020
  

  Pandemics and the Shape of Human History

  Outbreaks have sparked riots and propelled public-health innovations, prefigured revolutions and redrawn maps.

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  3/22/2020
  

  The Epidemics America Got Wrong

  by Jim Downs

  Government inaction or delay have shaped the course of many infectious disease outbreaks in our country, argues history professor Jim Downs.

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  3/11/2020
  

  The Shortages May Be Worse Than the Disease

  by Elise A. Mitchell

  Societies further their own destruction whenever they fail to provide anyone health care, housing, or dispensation from work because of their employment, socioeconomic, or immigration status.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  3/8/2020
  

  A Puritan Minister Incited Fury by Pushing Inoculation Against a Smallpox Epidemic

  In 1721, Boston’s colonists greeted Cotton Mather’s proposal with a terror that bordered on hysteria.  

• 
• SOURCE: The Conversation
  2-16-16
  

  Story of the Week: The man who developed a vaccination for smallpox

  by Andrew George

  Was his smallpox experiment really unethical?

• 
• SOURCE: Atlantic
  1-21-15
  

  This is how the French monarchy changed people's minds about the necessity of smallpox vaccinations

  by KIMBERLY CHRISMAN-CAMPBELL

  Today parents are reluctant to give their kids shots for measles. What we could learn from the French experience. 

• SOURCE: Salon
  5-4-13
  

  North America’s forgotten plague

  A LEAN FIGURE cast in bronze kneels beside a child, a tiny lancet in his hand poised to strike at the girl’s left shoulder. Another patient waits her turn, upper arm revealed. The memorial, outside the World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva, celebrates the global conquest of smallpox in 1980, a milestone that belongs on any list of reasons to be cheerful: Variola major gorged on our species for thousands of years, blazing a trail of hideous pustules that disfigured victims’ bodies and faces and wiped out communities. Children and the elderly were especially vulnerable, and those not felled by the disease were sometimes blinded by it.The Geneva memorial honours the physician as warrior in the eradication of smallpox. On a Pfizer campus in Pennsylvania, a twin statue tells a different story, positioning Big Pharma as the hero. Neither monument, however, recalls the many casualties of smallpox, and this says a great deal about what we choose to remember.One of the last major outbreaks in Canada began in the spring of 1862 when a ship from San Francisco arrived in Victoria and patient zero stepped ashore. Throughout the summer and autumn, smallpox raced north and east, up the coast and inland through canyons of tightly packed settlements that were perfectly suited to its appetite....