smallpox 
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
12/12/2022
Why Has American Progress Stalled? Blame Our Belief in "Eureka!"
Moments of creative innovation matter, but invention depends on a society that is prepared to take advantage and distribute the benefits.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 The effort was largely superseded by the more effective and safer Jenner vaccination, but was a foundational public health experiment that pays dividends today.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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....