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Nothing but the facts: smallpox
Robert H. Jackson academicanarchist
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Interesting post on smallpox, something I know a little about. One of my primary fields of historical research is Native American demography, and I have written quite a bit about smallpox. Here are several of my publications that touch on the issue:
Robert H. Jackson, Indian Demographic Decline :the Missions of Northwestern New Spain, 1687-1840. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994.
Robert H. Jackson, ."Epidemic Disease and Indian Depopulation in the Baja California Missions, 1697-1834," Southern California Quarterly 63 (1981), Pp. 308-346.
Robert H. Jackson, ."Causes of Indian Depopulation in the Pimeria Alta Missions of Northern Sonora," Journal of Arizona History 24 (1983), Pp. 405-429.
Robert H. Jackson, ."The 1781-1782 Smallpox Epidemic in the Baja California Missions," Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 3 (1981), Pp. 138-143.
I am currently writing a book on demographic patterns in the Jesuit missions of Paraguay, and am documenting several particularly lethal epidemics in 1738-1740 and 1764-1765. In some instances about half of the people living on the missions died from smallpox.
Inoculation by variolation fell out of use following the introduction of the Jenner Cowpox vaccine in the early 19th century. However, given the potential for high mortality variolation was a relatively effective means of combating the contagion. We are talking about a period when doctors still subscribed to the Greek humoral theory of deisease or the miasma theory that disease was caused by clouds of noxious gas floating in the air. Inoculation by variolation was one of the first forms of treating contagious crowd diseases. In my article on the smallpox epidemic in Baja California, I document the use of inoculation by variolation at one of the missions. Death rates were considerably lower. Smallpox mortality might be 30%, but using inoculation by variolation lowered this to about 5%. Inoculation by variolation and the cowpox vaccine did not confer complete immunity. The Spanish govt. sent a medical expedition to the Americas in 1803 to disseminate the cowpox vaccine, transmitted by children who were vaccinated. Inoculation by variolation and vaccination generated fear and suspicion among the general population, because smallpox was and is such a horrible disease. There are many instances of people resisting being inoculated or vaccinated. When inoculation by variolation was first tested, the subjects were convicts condemned to execution. Edward Jenner tested the cowpox vaccine on orphan children. Smallpox recurred periodically in the 19th and 20th centuries (for example in New York City in the 1940s), because parents did not always have their children treated. Robert Jackson
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