At the WHO website, I found one of the sources for the statistics cited by J. Diane Pearson (in "Medical Diplomacy and the American Indian: Thomas Jefferson, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and the Subsequent Effects on American Indian Health and Public Policy," Wicazo Sa Review 19.1, <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/wicazo_sa_review/v019/19.1pearson.html>, Spring 2004, p. 106): F. Fenner, D.A. Henderson, I. Arita, Z. Jezek, I.D. Ladnyi, _Smallpox and Its Eradication_, 1988, <http://www.who.int/emc/diseases/smallpox/Smallpoxeradication.html>. With my slow dial-up connection, it takes forever to download the whole book, so I'll get to it later.
The National Library of Medicine says that "[d]ried smallpox scabs were blown into the nose of an individual who then contracted a mild form of the disease" in Asia and Africa, while "Europeans and their American cousins tended to innoculate through a puncture in the skin" ("Variolation," <http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/smallpox/sp_variolation.html>).
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu quotes the French Ambassador as saying, "they take the small-pox here by way of diversion [in Turkey], as they take the waters in other countries," attesting to the safety of inoculation (_Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M--y W--y M--e: Written During her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa. . . _, vol. 1 [Aix: Anthony Henricy, 1796], pp. 167-69; letter 36, to Mrs. S. C. from Adrianople, n.d., <http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/montagu-smallpox.html>)</blockquote>
The Chinese method struck Voltaire as particularly ingenious: "I am inform'd that the Chinese have practis'd Inoculation these hundred Years, a Circumstance that argues very much in its Favour, since they are thought to be the wisest and best govern'd People in the World. The Chinese indeed don't communicate this Distemper by Inoculation, but at the Nose, in the same Manner as we take Snuff" ("Letter XI: On Inoculation," _Letters concerning the English Nation_, <http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/biomed/smallpox/voltaire.html>, 1733).
What is interesting, the National Library of Medicine notes that "African slaves introduced variolation into America. In Massachusetts, Cotton Mather learned about the practice from his slave, Onesimus. Mather publicized the technique and the procedure was first tried during a smallpox epidemic in Boston in 1721" ("Variolation," <http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/smallpox/sp_variolation.html>).
Apparently, the Europeans were among the last people on earth to hear of variolation, and it was a peculiar misfortune of American Indians to be colonized by the most uncivilized disease-ridden bunch of all colonizers, whose main claim to fame till the birth of industrial revolution was the invention of capitalism and chattel slavery.
The biggest risk of variolation probably was not that 1-2% of the variolated would die, though the mortality rate was "sometimes made worse by physicians who insisted on a preparatory diet limited to milk, water, and mercury [!]" (Daniel K. Richter, "The Imperial Virus" [a review of Elizabeth Fenn, _Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82_, NY: Hill & Wang Publishers, 2001], _Common-Place_ 2.3, <http://www.common-place.org/vol-02/no-03/reviews/richter.shtml>, April 2002); the chief danger lied in the fact that it was too expensive for the poor, whose lives were therefore imperiled by the variolation of their richer neighbors: "as [Elizabeth] Fenn explains [in _Pox Americana_], the high monetary cost of variolation -- two to five pounds -- added an element of class conflict to the opposition. Treatment was not only confined to the elite who could afford it but put the rest of the population at greater risk" (Richter, April 2002). So, sometimes, colonists in North America preferred quarantine to inoculation.
BTW, had the perfidious Lord Dunmore not refused to variolate Blacks who responded to his promise to emancipate slaves who would fight on the British side, the "Ethiopian Regiment" might have grown, and the colonists might have been forced to abolish slavery to compete with the British:
<blockquote>In late 1775 in Virginia, the British royal governor, Lord Dunmore, invited black slaves to desert their planter masters and join his army in suppressing the revolution. To the horror of the planter class -- who dominated the revolution in the southern colonies -- about a thousand slaves escaped to enlist in Dunmore's "Ethiopian Regiment." To the planters' relief, smallpox soon killed most of the black troops, whom the British had neglected to inoculate. Fenn observes that "the very act of assembling the Ethiopian Regiment had brought together in one place a large, vulnerable population." At a critical, early moment in the revolution, the collapse of the Ethiopian Regiment preserved the slave system from its greatest threat. The untimely (for African Americans) epidemic preserved the paradoxical linkage of black slavery and white freedom in the Revolutionary movement. (Alan Taylor, "Germ Colonies," _The New Republic_, <http://www.tnr.com/111901/taylor111901_print.html>, November 19, 2001)</blockquote>
If the Tories had inoculated all Indians and Blacks who wagered their destinies on their side, they could have very well won their counter-revolutionary war for all we know, since, for the first two years, smallpox took a heavy toll on the Continental Army: "In February 1776, Benedict Arnold, then in charge of the northern army, reported to Washington that 'the smallpox has crept in among our troops,' which Arnold feared could lead to 'the entire ruin of the Army'" (Leonard A. Cole, "Gone Today, Here Tomorrow?" [a review of Elizabeth Fenn, _Pox Americana_; Jonathan B. Tucker, _Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox_, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001; and Richard Preston, _The Demon in the Freezer: A True Story_, Random House, 2002], _Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists_, <http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=so03cole>, September/October 2003). But the British commanders foolishly opted to protect only their own soldiers: "The British rather easily opted for variolation. Since the disease was more endemic to the more urbanized mother country than to the predominantly rural colonies (where it came in infrequent but spectacular epidemics), most of the British troops had suffered from and survived smallpox as children or adolescents. The few who needed variolation could be easily cared for and protected by the majority. The superior professionalism, organization, and discipline of the British regulars also rendered effective their quarantine while they were undergoing the treatment" (Taylor, November 19, 2001). Finally, "in 1777 Washington ordered his troops inoculated. By the following year, his army was largely immune to the virus" (Cole, September/October 2003), and the rest is history as we know it.
To revisit the Ward Churchill controversy. . . .
The idea that smallpox is deliberately spread through poisonous gifts from the deceptive enemy is widespread among American Indians, and Indian legends of smallpox blankets predate the Lord Amherst incident of 1763, having begun to surface with "the earliest arrival of Europeans in the Americas" (Adrienne Mayor, "The Nessus Shirt in the New World: Smallpox Blankets in History and Legend," _Journal of American Folklore_ 108.427, Winter 1995, p. 57). It wasn't just Indians who feared smallpox as a biological weapon. Patriots in the revolutionary war, for instance, feared the British would use smallpox against them: though there was no hard evidence, "many American revolutionaries believed that the British were purposely infecting their army and their cities. An army report to Washington, for example, indicated that 'Our Enemies . . . had laid several schemes for communicating the infection of the smallpox, to the Continental army'" (Cole, September/October 2003).
Smallpox-blanket legends survive with many variations because they vividly dramatize a truth -- Indians _are_ victims of the American holocaust -- which is often denied or trivialized by uncritical celebrations of American freedom and progress that are staple of the dominant ideology; the legends, moreover, fulfill a social function of conflict management as they allow victims not to blame all colonists, only the mythically evil givers of smallpox blankets among them.
Besides, those who seek to debunk the smallpox-blanket legends as nothing but falsehood, forgetting the truth that the legends reveal and conceal at the same time, also have their own narrative strategy that is informed by more than a simple search for truth, so "[e]fforts to explain, deflect, and minimize the colonists' guilt are prominent in historical accounts of smallpox" (Mayor, p. 68).
By the time when the smallpox epidemic of 1837, whose interpretation has become an element in the Ward Churchill controversy, took place, a major part of the American holocaust had already decimated Indians. "East of the Mississippi, Indian numbers declined by seventy-five to ninety-five percent by 1800" (Richter, April 2002). Elizabeth Fenn writes that "_Variola_ was a virus of empire" (_Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82_, NY: Hill and Wang, 2001, <http://www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/amherst/fenn.html>). Or was it the other way around: empire as a virus, spreading poverty and pestilence among peoples whose lands it expropriated? -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>