HIST 3D Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Milkmaid, Case Fatality Rate, Hijab
History Writing Center-- Humanities A61
History.ucla.edu
Smallpox and 18th Century Medicine
1. Smallpox: cause, rise, and patterns
a. Virus and transmission
b. Clinical course
c. New world
d. Rise in 17th century
e. Age and mortality
f. Urban presence
2. Prevention: inoculation
a. The fast
b. Lady mary
c. Royal soc+jurin
d. Statistics
e. Resistence and city to country
3. Improvements in England
a. Technique: sutton
b. Little prep
c. isolation
d. General inoculations
4. Jenner and Vaccination
a. Life and training
b. Early hints
c. Previous xxx
d. 1790s why difficult (cowpox is rare)
e. James Phipps and Vaccination
f. Rapid spread
● Viral disease-- similar characteristics to having a cold or the flu
- Caused by a specialized DNA virus
- Arose between 68,000 and 16,000 years ago
- Evolved from a rodent disease
- Became possible to eradicate it
- 1979 WHO declared it eradicated
- Exists in laboratories, high security institutes, etc.
- Caused 15 million cases each year worldwide and killed 2 million
- Responsible for 300 to 500 billion deaths
● Person who has disease breathes out nucleated particles that reaches others
- Lands in lungs and has roughly 12 day incubation where it perforates
- Day 1: symptoms appear and general symptoms maintain for 3-4 days
- Day 4: rash, starts flat, turns into bump, gets larger, and softens to where you
have highly infected lymph inside
- Epithelial pathogen
- On the 14th day, one either recovers or dies
- No treatment
- First important manifestation of s mallpox occurred in the new world
- About 1520, a mild form of smallpox came to the new world with the spanish
conquistadors and spread rapidly from central America to North American and
South America
- By 1600, 90 to 95 % of the native population of the entire hemisphere died
- The only diseases native to the new world prior to their conquest: tuberculosis
and a form of syphilis
- 1600- start seeing virulent smallpox killing more and more (5, 10, 15 percent, etc)
- By about 1600-1620, smallpox seen largely in urban centers
- Important period in rapid growth in the size of urban cities
- Cities got bigger and more dense→ lethal smallpox could spread quickly
- Smallpox was constantly there in London (big, urban city), whereas it wasn’t
always there in Boston (smaller city)
- Case fatality came enormously by age: most dangerous to very young children,
least dangerous to young adults, and peaks again as you get older
● Prevention of Smallpox
- First preventative: inoculation (immunizing someone against a disease, and as
the immunizing agent, the disease itself is used)
- Inoculation gives you the disease, but because of the place where it was put, it
can’t proliferate and the immune system can take preventative measures
- Result is a mild case of smallpox, where upon recovery, the individual in immune
- Various techniques used for inoculation
- In china, take smallpox pustules, and inhale powder-like substance through nose
- By about 1600, “buying the pox”
- Sometimes whole villages would have pox parties, where the practitioner would
carry out inoculation on many people all at once
● First noticed by Lady Mary Montague:
- Daughter of one of richest men in England
- Got bad case of smallpox in her early 20s
- Scarring on her face
- Husband became the ambassador from the English king to the capital of the
ottoman Empire (Constantinople/Istanbul)
- Lived there for 2 and a half years and was fascinated by Turkish/Middle Eastern
culture
- Would put on hijab and would go out in public
- Heard of inoculation and had her English surgeon inoculate the older chidren she
brought with her
Document Summary
Viral disease-- similar characteristics to having a cold or the flu. Arose between 68,000 and 16,000 years ago. Exists in laboratories, high security institutes, etc. Caused 15 million cases each year worldwide and killed 2 million. Responsible for 300 to 500 billion deaths. Person who has disease breathes out nucleated particles that reaches others. Lands in lungs and has roughly 12 day incubation where it perforates. Day 1: symptoms appear and general symptoms maintain for 3-4 days. Day 4: rash, starts flat, turns into bump, gets larger, and softens to where you have highly infected lymph inside. On the 14th day, one either recovers or dies. About 1520, a mild form of smallpox came to the new world with the spanish. First important manifestation of s mallpox occurred in the new world conquistadors and spread rapidly from central america to north american and. By 1600, 90 to 95 % of the native population of the entire hemisphere died.
