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Prevention of Communicable Disease: Smallpox

SMALLPOX AND CHICKENPOX Smallpox is an acute, contagious, infectious disease characterized by the well-known eruption of small boils or pustules all over the body.

Varioloid and variola are terms sometimes applied to mild cases of smallpox under the mistaken impression that they are a different and less virulent disease. This is not the case. The mildest cases communicate the disease in its most malignant form. Smallpox is sometimes called by false names, such as Cuban itch, Porto Rico itch, Porto Rico scratches, or elephant itch, to conceal its existence in the community. There are, in fact, no such diseases and this practice is most reprehensible.

Smallpox has all the characteristics of a germ disease, but the germ which causes it has not yet been identified. It may occur at any season of the year, but is most prevalent in winter.

History. No other disease, not excepting the bubonic plague or "Black Death," has contributed an equally interesting chapter to the history of mankind. It is known to have prevailed in the far east many centuries before the Christian era. Europe was first visited with smallpox in the sixth century. Later it was widely disseminated by the crusades. It depopulated an entire colony in Greenland in the thirteenth century, contributed largely to the conquest of Mexico by Cortez in the sixteenth century, and destroyed far larger numbers of the American Indians than did the firearms and fire water of the white man. By the eighteenth century smallpox was distributed throughout Great Britain and the continent of Europe. Over 90 per cent of the population is said to have been affected and about onetenth of the entire mortality was caused by this disease. More than one-half of all the living are said to have been scarred and disfigured by it. Historians aver that women whose faces were not pockmarked were the exception. Not a little of the great reputation of famous beauties of this period is said to have been due to chance immunity from this disease. Smallpox before the days of vaccination spared neither high nor low. It spread its terrors alike in the homes of rich and poor, and even penetrated into the palaces of princes. More than a score of deaths in royal families were thus caused. A half dozen reigning monarchs were attacked but recovered. More than once it threatened the total extinction of representative European dynasties. George Washington, during his early manhood, was "strongly attacked by the smallpox" while on a visit to the West Indies.