Smallpox.

Smallpox.

Pox is a type of disease often caused by animal virus by pockmarks
from horses, camel, elephants, ponies, pigs, cows, goats, sheep and dogs.

Great pox is Syphilis caused by sexual contact is treated by anti-biotics.

Small pox, cow pox, chicken pox, is a disease caused by a contagious virus
and is treated with inoculation and vaccination.

Small pox is an infectious disease unique to humans caused by virus
Variola major and Variola minor. The term small pox was first used in Europe in the
15th century to distinguish Variola from Great pox syphilis.

Smallpox virus is contagious and spreads from person to person, causing severe illness,
even death if the person were not vaccinated within days of his being exposed to it.
Anti-biotics work against bacteria and not against virus. Anti-biotics was ineffective. There was no known cure. Smallpox localises in the small blood vessels of the skin,
in the mouth and the throat, resulting in a rash and raised fluid filled blisters.

It is believed to have emerged in human population about thousands of years ago, the disease killed about millions in a year alone in Europe in the 18th century. During the
Nineteenth and twentieth centuries fifty percent of the children population was wiped out
from the world. In the twentieth century, it was responsible for the death of 500 million throughout the world.

Inoculation was practised in India as can be traced from available records since the tenth
Century and involved in either nasal insufflations of powdered smallpox seeds or introducing smallpox pus into the skin. Sanskrit medical texts prescribed the procedure for the process of inoculation. It is placement of smallpox pus into skin of another where it will grow or reproduce anti-germs. It is commonly used by introducing serum vaccine in the body to produce or boost immunity from it.

Practice of inoculation originated in India. The Indian doctors practised inoculation on human beings.

“They lay it down as a principle that the immediate cause of the small pox in the mortal part of every being that the mediate or the second acting cause which stirs up the first and causes fermentation is multitudes of imperceptible animalcules floating in the atmosphere
that they are the cause of all epidemical diseases but more particularly of the smallpox.”

The English while serving in India in the sixteenth century passed on this theory of inoculation to England and it was in a modified form of a vaccine introduced all over Europe, Africa, Russia, USA.


In the USA George Washington became infected with smallpox on his visit to Barbados in the years 1751.

Andrew Jackson got infected with smallpox after he was taken prisoner by the British
during the American Revolution, and though he recovered, his brother Robert did not.

Abraham Lincoln contracted this disease during his Presidency possibly from his son Ted. He was quarantined in 1863 after giving the famous Gettysburg address.

USSR leader Stalin fell ill with smallpox at an age of 9. Though he recovered, he had
visible dots and circles left on his face and the body. His photographs were retouched to hide his pox marks.

Europe first developed a vaccine against small pox in the year 1796.
Smallpox is the only disease that has been completely wiped out from the surface of the world since the year 1980 as per the WHO reports.

Edward Jenner famously vaccinated a small boy against the deadly disease way back in the year 1796. He took some fluid from the blister of the hand of a milk maid
who had contracted a similar but mild form of attack from cowpox. He then
inoculated his gardener’s son with the pus, who was later exposed to smallpox but
he proved to be immune to it.


There was cultural and religious resistance throughout the world against this vaccine.
There are two samples of vaccines in existence held in freezers under tight security each in USA and USSR.
Now the world is free of smallpox disease. Thanks to the modern scientific methods
of treatment.