Smallpox now is a thing of the past. But it was a very serious disease indeed, killing millions over the centuries. It was the huge transmission rates of approximately 20% that made it a real killer. In the eighteenth century, some 400,000 Europeans died a year. 300 million is a lower estimate for the number killed by smallpox in the twentieth century. Those who died from smallpox include Mary Queen of England, Louis XV of France and Pocahontas. Survivors include Stalin, Elizabeth Queen of England and Maxim Gorky. However, it is one infectious disease, which has been eradicated. In 1979, the World Health Organization announced the good news.
The first time smallpox was recorded in English was by William Bullein, a physician in sixteenth-century England who recorded various diseases and epidemics that hit London (plague, pleurisy and smallpox) and looked for ways to heal them. He also introduced to the English language such words as relaxing, gurgle and artificial.
It was another Englishman, Edward Jenner, who pioneered a vaccine for smallpox. By no means the first person to find a way to prevent smallpox, Jenner capitalised on the knowledge that milkmaids did not generally catch smallpox. He inoculated an eight-year old boy with cowpox which resulted in him becoming immune to smallpox. The only reward for James Phipps was a free lease on a cottage, which later became the Jenner Museum. In Russia, the reward for Alexander Markov, the boy who supplied the lymph for inoculation of the Russian court including a smallpox survivor, Catherine the Great, suffered a much better fate. He was granted hereditary nobility.
Yes, Jenner found the way that Bullein had only hoped to find. Some people say that his work saved more lives than any other person who ever lived. A true standard bearer of medical research.
