How devastating pandemics change us
-snip-
1721, Boston: From inoculation to vaccination
At a lecture in Boston early in 1721, Cotton Mather, the hellfire Puritan minister, announced the coming of “the destroying angel,” a terrifying disease bearing down on the city. England was already under siege.
-snip-
At first, people ignored the outbreak, much as has happened in our own time. But starting in 1721, smallpox taught the Western world a powerful new lesson: Humans can prevent pandemic diseases. We can hem them in and, if we have the will, sometimes even eradicate them. Three unlikely heroes took up the fight that year in Boston. They included the African-born slave Onesimus—a biblical name Mather had put on him—and a physician and surgical innovator named Zabdiel Boylston. But the unlikeliest of them was Mather himself, a troubled character, vain, emotionally unstable, and still widely disliked as a dark force behind the Salem witch trials 29 years earlier.
Now, though, it was as if Mather had been preparing all his life for this moment, and for redemption. He had been a keen student of science and medicine from childhood, and no doubt it also became personal: Two wives and 13 of his 15 children would die before him, many from infectious disease. So he read British science journals and studied Native American medicines. And he paid attention when his “servant” Onesimus, “a pretty Intelligent Fellow,” told him about a method of preventing smallpox in Africa and showed him the resulting scars. Details of this method were also circulating in England, based on reports from Turkey.
As the outbreak was beginning to spread, Mather alerted Boston’s physicians to “a Wonderful Practice lately used in several Parts of the World” to stop it. The technique was to take a patient with smallpox and puncture one of the ripe pustules to draw off pus, or “variolous matter.” A portion of this material then went into an incision in the skin of someone who was still perfectly healthy. The promise of “variolation,” or inoculation, was that it would produce immunity, after what would probably be only a mild case of one of the deadliest diseases on Earth.
-more-
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2020/08/how-devastating-pandemics-change-us-feature/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=NatGeoPlus_20200726&rid=FB26C926963C5C9490D08EC70E179424
= new reply since forum marked as read
