Smallpox

A baby with smallpox (from the CDC)

Smallpox was a very serious disease. Many people died of it. Smallpox caused little bumps on your skin, like chickenpox but much more serious. About two to five of every ten people who got smallpox died of it. There was (and is still) no treatment that worked.
The first time we know of anybody having smallpox (at least we think it was smallpox) is in the Parthian empire about 150 AD. It may have been a smallpox epidemic that weakened the Parthian army so that the Roman army was able to push it back (or it may have been measles). But when the Roman soldiers returned home from that war, about 160 AD, they brought the smallpox with them. Many soldiers, and many other people in the Roman Empire, died of smallpox over the next hundred years. Smallpox spread the other direction, to China, about the same time, possibly weakening and ending the Han Dynasty and leading to civil war.

The next smallpox outbreak we know about was in India, around 400 AD. Doctors in India described it as like grains of rice all over your skin, with burning pain. They blamed it on a new goddess, Sitala.
There was a serious outbreak of smallpox in Europe about 581 AD. After that, there were smaller outbreaks in Europe here and there, but it's just like chickenpox, once you get it once you can't get it again, and so once a lot of people were immune future outbreaks were not as serious.

By about 1000 AD, doctors in India and China were beginning to figure out how to prevent smallpox, though they still couldn't help you once you had caught it. In India, doctors rubbed pus from a sore on a person with smallpox into a small cut on your arm. In China, doctors blew powdered smallpox scabs up your nose. This worked like a vaccination. These ways of vaccinating people became common in China and India and in the Islamic world, and also in East Africa, but nobody in Europe even knew about it.

In the 1500's, when people from Europe first began to go to South America, they brought a man from Africa (as a slave) who had smallpox with them, and some of the people who lived in South America caught it. None of these people were immune, and within a few years about 60-90 percent of the people died (that's six to nine out of every ten people!). Soon people in North America caught smallpox too, and most of them also died. Nearly the entire population of North and South America died of either smallpox or measles.

Finally in the 1700's people in England and in North America began to hear about the Asian vaccination process, and they started to use it. In Boston, an African man who was one of Cotton Mather's slaves told people that he had been vaccinated in Africa, before he left, and explained how to do it. Gradually doctors developed methods of vaccinating using shots instead of blowing scabs up your nose. More and more people were vaccinated, all over the world, until the last case of smallpox in the world was in 1977, in Somalia (East Africa).

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