National Immunization Awareness Month: The Importance of the Smallpox Vaccine

A tale of caution and triumph for human beings, and having context in ancient records all the way through modern medical research, the smallpox vaccine is a historical snapshot of how we have chosen to act and protect ourselves from viruses that threaten our health and lives. Vaccines and the pathogens they target have reshaped and defined entire societies. Much in the way we can see how the contemporary response to Covid-19 has affected every facet of life, from the economy to education. Despite conflicting social beliefs surrounding the topic, every person can agree, the virus has disrupted some part of their daily routine. Outbreaks of disease and famine were familiar to ancient peoples and the advent of medical records and observance of these outbreaks tracks disease back thousands of years.

So where does smallpox come into this storyline? Well, Variola Virus, universally known as Smallpox, is one of those contributing diseases that helped secularize human health and treatment in eradicating pathogens that pose a threat to humankind. A particularly destructive virus, approximately three out of every ten people to contract the virus would die, others would often be left disfigured and scarred from their suffering.

The world began to recognize the disease as it spread through East Asian trade and was recorded first in the region of China and the Korean Peninsula later recorded spreading to Europe, North Africa, and eventually to the United States via continued trade, shifts in population displacement, and militant, often destructive conquest. Modern observation of Egyptian mummies finds the earliest known example of smallpox, spanning to before the 11th century BC, implying its probable existence for many thousands of years before the common era (CE). Those written records in China would not appear until more than 1,500 years later. It’s not certain, however, multiple plagues in history are thought to have been the result of smallpox outbreaks.

In the middle of the 18th century, Edward Jenner, upon an apprenticeship taken early in his schooling, the young science minded individual observed that milkmaids who were often susceptible to cowpox in their line of work. He also made the observation that milkmaids appeared protected against Smallpox. It was not until years later at the turn of the 19th century that Jenner would begin his work to propel humankind into the age of viral medicine and eradication of smallpox. By simply observing that milkmaids were not contracting the virus, he decided to perform an experiment on an eight year old boy, which today would have been considered unconscionable. Jenner first administered cowpox through inoculation and waited for the symptoms of the disease to subside. Once that occurred, organic matter from the wound of a smallpox victim was administered to the boy, and as Jenner predicted, the boy was unharmed. Jenner subsequently coined the term ‘vaccination’ deriving from the Latin, vacca which means cow. His discoveries made him both loved and hated by the general public as people sought to challenge or dismiss his theories at the same time the country and world began to recognize the importance of vaccination. Now, questions like how long vaccines were to protect people had still gone unanswered and would not be until the late 19th century.

By the 1950s, the scientific community was able to provide global data for the spread of diseases like smallpox and could develop treatment and inoculation plans. With the Help of the World Health Organization (WHO), The medical community set forth to eradicate smallpox. On May 8, 1980, the human kind reached a medical milestone and successfully eradicated the Smallpox virus. Today small samples of the disease still exist for supposed research, however many in the scientific community urge the extermination of the disease entirely to draw a true close to the thousands of years of scars, suffering, and death the disease laid forth for the history books.

If you would like to learn more about the smallpox vaccine, our information was sourced from History.com, The CDC and The US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health.