143. Variolation, Clean Water, Infectious Diseases, and Ducks in Kansas

Maybe one of the reasons that we have so much disagreement in our country about vaccinations is that we learned so little about disease in our history classes. Our textbooks were full of kings and queens, emperors, presidents, and generals. We named wars and religions, charted Columbus and Magellan on their journeys—and fixed dates to them. It was a story of progress from the ancient Greeks and Romans through Luther, the Enlightenment, the New World and the “American Century.” 

The 14th century plague in Europe and the great Irish potato famine got little notice; yet the impact of the plague—the dying of 25 million, a third of Europe’s population was tremendous. We learned about Irish immigration, but the cause of the potato famine—a blight due in part to the reliance on only two of hundreds of varieties of potato brought from the “new world,” was not part of our learning. 

Maybe some teachers passed on the story of Washington using variolation—dried smallpox scabs were blown into the nose of an individual who then contracted a mild form of the disease—to fend off smallpox at Valley Forge, but I doubt any in our generation knew that the technique went back to Asia and migrated to England in the early 1700s, or that it was brought to America by African slaves. How many of us know now about the British Doctor, Edward Jenner, who found in 1796 that English milkmaids, having been exposed to cowpox, seemed relatively immune to smallpox, and promoted vaccinations? How many of us know that the vaccination efforts of the World Health Organization have now eradicated smallpox from the globe?

Covid vaccine proponents are more likely to point to the success of the polio vaccine in the 1950s and 60s. They don’t explain that the discovery of polio and its transmission—fecal contamination in water—was a long process, or that a higher and stronger incidence of an old infectious disease grew as public sanitation improved. Clean water erased the small contaminations that helped develop immunity in children; new and more virulent infections rose in America in the 1900s with sanitation, and were finally laid to rest by Sabin and Salk vaccines beginning in the 1950s. 

Our new pandemic seems an echo of 1918, and scholars still probing the misnamed Spanish Flu now think that it moved across the world with soldiers, that it struck some 500 million world-wide, and killed 25-50 million, and that it began in Kansas where it passed from ducks to humans.

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