Old records show vax hesitancy to fight smallpox
Three centuries later, the parallels with the Coronavirus pandemic are uncanny
A highly contagious disease originating far from America's shores triggers deadly outbreaks that spread rapidly, infecting the masses. Shots are available, but a divided public agonises over getting jabbed.
Newly digitised records — including a minister’s diary scanned and posted online by Boston’s Congregational Library and Archives — are shedding fresh light on devastating outbreaks of smallpox that hit the city in the 1700s.
And three centuries later, the parallels with the coronavirus pandemic are uncanny.
“How little we’ve changed,” said CLA archivist Zachary Bodnar, who led the digitization effort, working closely with the New England Historic Genealogical Society.
“The fact that we’re finding these similarities in the records of our past is a very interesting parallel,” Bodnar said in an interview. “Sometimes the more we learn, the more we’re still the same, I guess.”
Smallpox was eradicated, but not before it sickened and killed millions worldwide. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the last natural outbreak of smallpox in the United States occurred in 1949. In 1980, the World Health Organization's decision-making arm declared it eradicated, and no cases of naturally occurring smallpox have been reported since.
But in April 1721, after an English ship, the HMS Seahorse, brought it to Boston, it was a clear and present danger. By winter of 1722, it would infect more than half of the city's population of 11,000 and kill 850.
Much earlier outbreaks, also imported from Europe, killed Native
Americans indiscriminately in the 1600s. Now, digitized church records are helping to round out the picture of how the colonists coped when it was their turn to endure pestilence.
The world's first proper vaccination didn’t occur until the end of that century, when an English country doctor named Edward Jenner inoculated an 8year-old boy against smallpox in 1796.