The Hidden Half of Nature by David R. Montgomery

Author:David R. Montgomery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

THE POX

The “speckled monster,” smallpox, had ravaged civilizations for far longer than polio. While many Americans alive today can still remember the polio outbreaks of the 1940s and 1950s, smallpox had already been eradicated in the United States. Outbreaks continued in developing nations but, by 1980, smallpox became the first disease to be eradicated from the planet.

The virus Variola major causes the most fatal form of smallpox. It is among the pathogens that began plaguing humanity early on, shortly after the dawn of agriculture. Smallpox epidemics waxed and waned through the centuries, and the populations with the longest exposure to the virus slowly began to build up immunity.

People of all ages had about a one-in-three chance of contracting smallpox during an outbreak and, once infected, about a one-in-five chance of dying. As with most infectious diseases, children were particularly susceptible. If infected, the fatality rate among children under ten ranged from about 80 to 98 percent.

In the closing years of the eighteenth century, smallpox killed 400,000 Europeans each year. Throughout history, first in the Old World and then later in the New World, smallpox epidemics indiscriminately killed rich and poor alike. With the exception of bubonic plague, smallpox has probably killed more people over the course of history than all other infectious diseases combined.

Survivors were not left unscathed. Imagine a horrendous case of blistering acne all over your body. Where smallpox pustules erupted, they scabbed over. Hardened, crater-shaped pocks disfigured the faces of many survivors. Burst pustules could leave a crust over one’s eyes. It’s estimated that smallpox caused over a third of the cases of blindness among Europeans in the eighteenth century. So bad are smallpox lesions that they are detectable on Egyptian mummies dating as far back as the fifteenth century B.C. There is even evidence that the young Pharaoh Ramses V died of smallpox several centuries later, in 1145 B.C. And Chinese descriptions of the disease date back to at least the eleventh century B.C.

During these terrible outbreaks, survivors tended to the newly afflicted. It was common knowledge that surviving infection conferred immunity. And while no one knew exactly why or how this worked, they knew it did. In contrast, medical treatment often did more harm than good. Ninth-century Persian physician Al-Razi first distinguished smallpox from measles while chief of the hospital in Baghdad. He recommended that the disease be sweated out of patients to speed the release of “bad humours”—vapors thought to arise from fermentation of the blood.

For centuries, those patients unfortunate enough to afford medical treatment were confined to rooms with blazing fires and sealed windows. European patients endured equally misguided treatments. Leeches were applied to bleed out the fever. Many among the well-to-do experienced the “red treatment.” This desperate and illogical practice involved dressing patients in red, and keeping them covered in red blankets in rooms hung with red drapes. The practice continued into the early twentieth century.

Smallpox made its way from Asia to Europe between the fifth and sixth centuries. Trade routes, like the Silk Road that stretched from China to Syria, helped spread the virus around the world.

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