Viruses, Variolation & Vaccines (Part 3)

“A fool-hardy and dangerous experiment”

Apr 23, 2022

In Part 2, I outlined how smallpox devastated individual lives and whole societies before it was finally eradicated in the late-20th century. I concluded that article by describing covid-19 as “smallpox reborn - or at least its shadow”.

I find it interesting that the entire covid edifice appears to have been based on the smallpox story. It is as if smallpox was used as a template by those behind the ‘covid project’, especially in the way vaccines have been pushed by virtually every part of the establishment.

But before vaccines there was variolation, and that is where we begin.

Three hundred years ago people were not dependent on radios, televisions, or smartphones for news of the outside world. Their understanding of the ravages of smallpox came not from electronic devices, nor from the utterances of politicians and government officials, but from what they saw all around them. As a 19th-century historian reflected:

The smallpox was always present, filling the churchyards with corpses, tormenting with constant fears all whom it had stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of the bighearted maiden objects of horror to the lover.1

People back then must have believed there was no escape from smallpox, that sooner or later everyone would get it. The prevailing state of mind was captured by a contributor to the multi-volume Encyclopédie published in France in the mid-18th century. In his article ‘Inoculation’, the author quoted Charles Marie de La Condamine’s description of the disease as

an imposed lottery in which we find ourselves interested in spite of ourselves: each of us has his/her ticket, the longer it takes to draw our number, the greater the danger.2

Just imagine waiting for the day when your number would almost inevitably come up. But this was a prize no one wanted to win. So maybe the odds could be lengthened?

In order to circumvent the worst effects of the disease the rich and the poor deliberately infected themselves and/or their children with smallpox. They did this in the belief that a) not only would they survive the resulting infection but it would be mild and leave no scars, and b) they would gain lifelong immunity from any further infection.

The process was similar to the horticultural practice of inoculation, i.e. grafting a bud from one plant to another. Indeed the word ‘inoculation’ was often used to describe this self-infection procedure. But the correct term is ‘variolation’ after variola, the Latin word for smallpox. Variolation involved transferring some diseased matter from an infected person into or onto the subject’s body. This could be done through an incision in the arm, by blowing dried smallpox pustules into the nostrils, or by rubbing infected material against the skin.

Strangely there is no record of a similar approach being adopted with other dreaded diseases, like leprosy, syphilis, rabies, or even bubonic plague (otherwise known as the Black Death). Yes, parents induced in their children less serious ailments like chickenpox or mumps in order to ward off future problems - but smallpox?

A modern historian has summed up the unique nature of variolation:

Variolation is such a huge affront to common sense that it is difficult to think of anyone coming up with the idea, let alone being foolish enough to try it out. Smallpox was feared and loathed in every culture because what it did to people was cruel and revolting. This makes it all the more incredible that anyone would deliberately collect pus or scabs from a smallpox victim and use this material to infect someone who had been lucky enough to escape the attention of the Angel of Death.3

There are no hard facts about the origins of variolation, only speculation - lots of it. Some say variolation was born out of a mysterious process of alchemical magic. Others suggest that the idea was conveyed to the mind of its progenitor in a dream.

**“The Seventh Seal” (1957), dir. Ingmar Bergman**

Perhaps unsurprisingly a financial angle has also been mooted. Smallpox could deplete slave traders’ profits if it destroyed the lives or the appearance of their human ‘merchandise’. One theory is that variolation was invented in order to prevent a financial loss to this otherwise vibrant ‘business’.

Depending on which story you prefer, the practice of variolation spread to Europe either from the Orient or the Middle East, reaching Britain and Ireland early in the 18th century. While the well-heeled could afford to have their physicians add variolation to their armoury of potions and other remedies, the poorer sections of society turned to travelling lay inoculators who performed the necessary procedure for a small fee. In fact this type of commercial transaction was the most common means for ordinary folk to be inoculated, in Ireland and elsewhere, hence the widely-used expression: “buying the pocks”.4

During its 18th-century heyday, variolation or ‘buying the pocks’ was seen by most people as a boon to humanity. The British king George II’s own doctor, Richard Mead, was one of the many members of his profession who gave their backing to the practice. In one of his memoirs, Mead drew on his own clinical experience to argue that “the inoculated is safer than the natural small pox”.5 The anonymous author of the article on ‘Inoculation’ in the Encyclopédie argued that for “anyone who has never had this disease [and who] runs a very great risk of catching it and of dying from it”, there was no better means “to escape this danger…than inoculation”.6 Another English physician, Edward Jenner (of whom more anon), acknowledged “the happy effects of Inoculation”, having been inoculated himself as a child.7

For its champions, the lifesaving potential of variolation was a big selling point. Richard Mead maintained “that scarce one in a hundred dies by the inoculated small pox; whereas many more in proportion are destroyed by the ordinary disease”.8 Several observers at the time asserted that the rise in the British population during the latter part of the 18th century was due to the widespread practice of inoculation in that country.9 Before variolation became accepted in France, one local advocate estimated that the widespread application of the procedure “would save the life of twelve or thirteen hundred citizens per year in just one city (Paris), and of more than twenty-five thousand in the kingdom”.10

Today variolation is important for a very different reason - it was the precursor to the smallpox vaccine. Without the smallpox vaccine there would be none of the other vaccines that have proliferated in the 20th and 21st centuries - including the several covid vaccines.

But how were ordinary people persuaded to accept variolation in the first place, described above as “a huge affront to common sense”? Even the enlightened minds behind the 18th-century Encyclopédie found the concept of variolation hard to take:

If inoculation had never been practiced, and if someone proposed to make its first trial, this idea would appear very odd, bizarre, repulsive, of very doubtful success, a fool-hardy and dangerous experiment.11

Was it fear of possible death or disfigurement that propelled so many to infect not only themselves but their children too? Some perhaps. But even before variolation was supplanted by vaccination, another factor was being brought into play.

At the end of his long article in the Encyclopédie, the unknown contributor considered whether “a law to compel fathers to inoculate their children” would be necessary to satisfy “the public good”. Although he concluded that “encouragement and example would suffice”, an association between medical treatment and legal sanction was being mooted in a public forum.12 In England, that link was already moving from theory into practice. There, local authorities paid for their poor to be inoculated because it was cheaper than the expense of caring for them if they became ill with smallpox. However, we are told that in many instances the parish authorities compelled “everyone within their jurisdiction to be inoculated”.13

These were the first signs of a tendency that continued through the 19th century, reaching its apogee during the last two years. That tendency was for the state to exert tight control over the medical decisions of its citizens, to a degree that has astonished and dismayed many.

History In The Making

Viruses, Variolation & Vaccines (Part 3)

“A fool-hardy and dangerous experiment”