Dear Diary, I've just been visited quite unexpectedly by the oddest of a kindly face, ruddy cheeks and a soft manner about him.
Oh. The strangest questions came in the mail and said the sun was barely in the sky.
It was so early. I was just finished up with the girls and he started asking all sorts of questions about the cocks of it.
Don't you want to whatever at it? He asked if he saw blisters.
Of course he may not. He mumbles and about our we shouldn't worry on the deadly smallpox.
We hear so much about how we might. Emax talks the others.
He was on his way. Really very strange. Welcome to the 18th century and to the fifth episode of our history of endemic series.
We've arrived to the point when Europe is going through yet another major outbreak of smallpox,
a disease that's been plaguing populations around the globe for centuries.
In a moment, we'll hear just whom our diary writing milkmaid is describing and why he says central to the story.
But first, let's find out exactly what this disease was.
I discussed this with both Bloche Agoutis and Brian Angus, whom we met in previous episodes,
and then with our historical expert today, Dr Roderick Bain from our faculty of history.
As you'll hear, we had a few small drop outs in sound due to our respective Internet connexions.
But I promise it's worth sticking with the story.
Smallpox was a serious infectious disease caused by two variants of Vario, the virus barrier in a major and varied a minor.
A lot of viruses coming from animals. And so smallpox probably dried as it is other hoax viruses.
And it so happens it's closely related to cowpox, I say was because it has been eradicated.
The last naturally occurring case was diagnosed in October 1977 and the World
Health Organisation certified eradication of the disease in nineteen eighty,
essentially for smallpox. Potts's eradicate it.
It was spread mainly by fairly direct and prolonged face to face contact between people, most commonly by airborne respiratory droplets.
So coughs, sneezes also by saliva's to sing Chevon drinks also skin to skin contact such as Handshake's or Hogg's also by products.
So anti needles or unscreened lot.
Interestingly, smallpox can only be spread by humans. Scientists have found no evidence that smallpox can be spread by insects or animals.
Smallpox was highly fatal disease, highly infectious disease.
It's difficult now to think for us to think about it because it's no longer with us.
But it was the most horrific disease. If you're going to do a top 10 of unpleasant diseases,
it's going to be near the top because it's such a hard hitting and frightening disease to have, but also just to be aware of and to dread.
There's a little. It's very much a disease associated with dread as well, a demotion because of its its symptoms.
It could be hugely disfiguring as well as, of course, fatal.
It could also lead the survivors horribly mutilated because it tended to infect the face.
And in addition, it caused blindness.
And it's been estimated a third of populations or some populations in Europe were very deeply, badly affected by it.
And perhaps even one in two people had it in experience at the time of their life.
And it was also a disease which affected children out of proportion to other age groups.
So that's another reason for its emotional impact, that it was one that affected families and it affected parents as well as as well as older people.
There was a feeling that it was something that children were especially especially vulnerable to.
One in three deaths in Europe that time could well have been to do with with smallpox.
After Roderic had run through some of the terrible consequences of catching this disease,
I asked Bolshy to take me through how the unlucky victim would typically experience it initially.
You can have high fevers, body aches, vomiting. So the rash starts with small risk spots on the tongue or in the mouth, essentially.
Then they change sores. They break open that that spreads large amounts of virus into the mask and throat.
And this is the point that people are the most contagious, because when they cough out all this viral load onto people near them following this,
they have the rash on the skin which starts in the face, spreads the arms down to the legs, hands and feet or within about 24 hours.
And by the fourth day, the skin sores, they filled with this thick, opaque fluid and they have a bit of a dent in the middle.
And this is the essentially the typical smallpox image that we know.
And the very old virus can be found in Slivered in these sores and also the scabs and therefore loss.
And people who come into contact with this flu starts to become infected themselves.
Essentially, they, though, often scabs fall off. Then that's when the healing process starts and there's about 30 percent risk of death with smallpox.
And those people are left with scars afterwards. This sounds awful.
And I assume that it must have been a disease that inspired terrible fear in people at the time.
Yes, it is. It's a disease that provokes a lot of distress and fear.
It doesn't quite result in the same terror that you see in social disruption that you see with the plague,
for example, because it's something that is both disgusted by the Demmer endemic and epidemic.
It is always there. It is something that is that is not necessarily an invader from outside all the time.
It is something that people are familiar with all of the time. It is always it always there in the background.
And it's also something that does not necessarily wipe out men of working age and.
Women of working age in the same way that the plague did.
So it's not quite the same. Not quite the same social impactors as others.
We're talking about Europe, of course, where there was more immunity to it.
Natural immunity to it. And certain groups in places like North America where smallpox was introduced.
17TH century onwards, it had a far more devastating impact because there was no record of immunity to that disease at all.
So amongst the Native American populations, the indigenous populations there,
the smallpox just cut massive swathe through those populations with very decisive and defining consequences.
But the history of that continent before discussing the outbreak, we'll be looking at in the 18th century.
I asked Robert to take me through a quick history of the disease to that point.
So smallpox in the pre inoculation, pretty vaccination era was still very much a terrible disease to have.
We have to be careful that we don't read too much into ancient history and tried to diagnose diseases that broke out in ancient Greece.
And so when we don't have materials available to confirm the labels that we use today are often not quite applicable to what we were looking at that.
But smallpox by which as it's represented in written sources and also in art as well.
So paintings, illuminated manuscripts,
that sort of evidence from the Middle Ages and mediaeval periods demonstrate that that afflictions like smallpox,
if it was not smallpox, were very, very well, were certainly presence.
There is a story that smallpox came back from the Crusades.
So this is a story current at the time that the Crusaders brought smallpox back from the Middle East.
And here again, we see the other ring of societies.
We had we see societies being stigmatised as being dirty and vulnerable and disease disease ridden,
and that the healthy Europeans are afflicted as a consequence of being in close touch with disease, unpleasant people.
So you see that again during this period.
But in actual fact, it's highly like the smallpox virus was endemic in Europe long before the Crusades had been there for centuries onwards.
But it's really when when we come to the 17th century that we see the populations begin to move and begin to mix and begin to increase in size.
Urbanisation, industrialisation sees populations living more closely together.
Closely packed communities are more vulnerable to infectious disease.
And it's then that we really see smallpox taking a grip and having this terrifying impact on populations across across Europe.
And it's the 17th century that we really see that. But it was also a disease that would would would come and go.
I think it's important to remember that because there were cases where societies were
becoming communities are becoming immune to it through to early practises and inoculation.
It meant that you'd have a reservoir of people who would become immune.
And then, of course, when they start dying out and their children come through who are no longer immune,
and then then they would suddenly become susceptible to smallpox again.
So there was a cycle really of it coming and going. A bit of it waning and it increasing over time.
And of course, 17th century, as well as a period of great movements, population movements of wars as well.
So there's a lot of disruption to communities, people coming and going.
For example, it was an active topic. There was a if there was a crop failure and you may see people from the countryside
moving into urban areas and they might become not only bring the disease with them,
but they would also perhaps have less immunity than the people in the cities that they were then join in.
So they may have also had a rich reservoir of people in a city who were more susceptible
to smallpox than than people who will literally be living in those cities for some time.
This understanding of smallpox as both an epidemic and an endemic disease was also emphasised by Eric Adjunctive,
associate professor in the history of medicine in boxwoods faculty of history.
So before those inoculation, very early.
And so that even before vaccination, what happens with smallpox is it becomes a kind of endemic disease in England and the 17 habits.
But it's a cycle and again, it's regional. So like urban centres such as London.
It's endemic. It's part of life because a lot of children. But in rural areas, it's something that comes in every 20 years, 30 years.
And so there is an epidemic. What I found very. That is in the same contacts with me about how small parts of this goes to America
as a place where they don't have smallpox and really devastates societies there.
People often see that as being the most devastating epidemic in the historical record.
You can kind of go close in and say smallpox is epidemic in some parts of England, endemic in other parts.
And you can even go further out and say smallpox is endemic in Europe, but an epidemic in the Americas.
And one of the interesting things about the Americas that smallpox is that it shows us how difficult it is to try to measure an epidemic.
The debates on how many people are actually killed by smallpox in the Americas is constantly debated,
partly because I don't know how to measure extreme mortality.
Some people say it can kill off nine percent of populations,
partly because there's a huge debate over actually indigenous populations and that they are.
But also because it's people point out this is not the smallpox acting on its own.
It's about smallpox and European colonisation, which can be quite brutal.
Upended societies, often destroyed crops and livestock, ways of living alongside war and conquest.
So I always say that smallpox in the Americas is a great example for getting us to break
down this notion that disease just isn't this kind of individual entity acting on society.
Because what we need to remember is that smallpox is working in tandem with human activity.
I was keen to understand more about where we get most of our information on this period.
Obviously, we left with written records, diaries, letters.
Those are sortable personal documents that survived to give you a vivid insights, admittedly, from a literate population, of course.
So we don't still really have the voices of of others about a section of society
that the poorer sections of society are less educated sexual scientists.
So we still don't really have that perspective that we had on other later diseases.
If we're talking about the 17th century, we also have mortality rates.
Of course, it builds mortality. We have documents that that record the causes of death in this period.
And those are very helpful in allowing us to reconstruct the death rates and figures of a particular in Europe in this period.
But again, the impact of smallpox on populations in the Americas and overseas and not in not in Europe, but in the new world again,
is very it is very difficult for us to know these days because these were not societies that let the rich written record.
We can also see smallpox being referred to in popular literature if the time was often used as a really easy way out for people.
So I if you were writing a novel in the 19th century novel, 1996 novel,
you could just say X and Y just die of smallpox and you wouldn't necessarily have to go into any detail.
Was anybody reading that would know what you meant? You just wanted to kill off somebody in your book and you can often use smallpox,
but it's definitely a feature of novels of that period when people were killed off in social order by just saying,
you know, X and Y, you contracted smallpox and died. So it's a useful get out.
I wondered what the medical profession looked like in the 18th century in comparison to how it's structured today.
So the medical profession in Europe in the 18th century wasn't quite the medical profession that we're familiar with today.
In some ways, it was a less respected and less authoritative recession.
So the voice of a physician was not necessarily taken as being the be all and end all of medical advice.
There was a great deal of folk medicine still in place around around Europe, at least at this time in these years.
There were also a great, great number of alternative medical practitioners as well.
You also had alternative medical remedies to diseases and other reflections,
but also cheaper medical medical remedies because physicians cost money and poor members of
society were not always able to access the facilities and hope that they could provide.
So we have this image of quack's today. Quack doctors in which doctors take medicines and things.
But in those days, quite a lot of the time, those were for a large portion of society.
Those were the only ones that were available and they were perhaps more trustworthy because they'd been used for decades,
some some old traditions and folk remedies to different types of medical flexion.
So some of these things were trusted more than the advice of a professional medical doctor practitioner, as you might understand.
I also wondered what some of those early remedies would look like.
There were various remedies to smallpox before vaccination.
Some of them would strike us today is extremely unusual. So, for example, the colour red was seen as something that could ward off or treat smallpox.
There were a lot of alternate alternative solutions like purging, purging the body of blood.
This is related to the to the human system by which the body was understood for many centuries.
There were incantations and they were in some societies,
they were gods and saints to whom you could pray in order to ward off all seek treatment for smallpox.
My understanding was that the first big move away from these practises was very elation.
So I asked Roderick to tell me more about this early practise correlation or inoculation.
It's also known and in grafting was another way.
That's not a time for it. It was described at the time as essentially is the deliberate infection of a
healthy human body with smallpox in order to to make that fresh human body,
that unaffected body immune to smallpox, essentially man taking pus from an infected individual.
Ideally, a mild case of smallpox and then inserting that into the bloodstream of somebody who wasn't infected.
And then they would suffer. They would come down with a with a case of they would become ill then something that becomes sensitive.
What they would do, the idea the hope was,
and it was proven quite often was that they would recover swiftly by comparison to a full dental infection of normal smallpox.
And then not only would they recover, but they would also be immune for the rest of their life.
This seemed to me rather similar to the chicken pox parties that I remember being taken to as a child.
In some ways, the principle is similar in the sense that you are physical's.
It was aimed at children were very much at the centre of the practise.
The idea with parents would want to ensure that the children were new.
And of course, the parents invariably knew very well the quite how distressing and devastating smallpox could be.
So they was there was a great deal of enthusiasm for variation inoculation.
Yes. It does mean taking your child to be deliberately infected with a disease that you cannot be 100 percent certain will not kill.
And on top of that, the it is it is different to chicken pox parties in the sense that in order to enter the skin and in fact,
the blood, you have to harm the body. So there was also trepidation about that.
And it also put doctors in in a peculiar position is essentially they are not only harming the body with with with with their scalpels,
but they're also,
of course, inserting the disease that will make this child or the person whom you infecting could make them seriously ill and could kill them.
The next big medical breakthrough after their relation came from a man who may well have heard of Edward Jenner.
There is a story, of course, that Edward Jenner, a young English doctor,
late late 18th century story, is that he became aware from his work as a doctor in Gloucestershire,
he became aware that milkmaids dairymaid women who who milked cattle were protected from smallpox, that they did not they did not get it.
And the idea was that somehow they were infected with that.
They might they became infected with cowpox, which was a similar disease.
Don't infected cows and nertz dairymaid, and therefore were somehow immune to smallpox.
That's actually that was not his discovery that had be known for some some time.
But he was certainly the first to try to put it on some kind of hard scientific grounding.
And he was the man who decided to try to publicise, tried to spread,
spread the word really of this on the basis of experiments that he had done personally in in
Gloucestershire on individuals who he was able to show and demonstrate that they were cowpox,
arantes, smallpox and developing gener very famously,
I think very modestly said that he just the studies to show something that was already being practised by milkmaids, for example.
Sure. You could protect against smallpox using another virus. And of course, that's what we're doing with these adeno viral vectors.
We used genetic engineering to change them rather than just discover them.
Of course, not all of Jenny's methods would have been allowed today if we were looking at it today through the through the lens of bioethics.
I think we were. Raising eyebrows somewhat at Janna's methods.
At that time, I can't imagine his his particular research all being weighed through by an ethics committee.
He essentially, yes,
infected a a a child who was the son of his gardener with cowpox and then subsequently in order to test whether that made him immune to smallpox.
He then infected the child deliberately with smallpox. And in this case, very fortunately for all concerned, the child did not develop smallpox.
There is an interesting dynamic here between the doctor and the physician and the child.
And also, I think we. What was the relationship, you might wonder, between Jana and his God?
Is there a degree of authority here that's and dynamic between employer and employee?
These are the sorts of things that they will be flagged as as no go areas.
But I think in those days, of course, there was a very different way of approaching ethical quandaries such as this.
And he's gardener's son wasn't the only person on whom Jenna practised.
So Jenna doesn't stop treating and then infecting more boxes.
Gardener's son. He also treats his own son and others.
And these all feature in his in the report that he writes up at the end of the 18th century,
which is in which his findings and his recommendations go to go forward.
And it's those that take to take his reputation, one in which his reputation is founded.
And it's his findings, of course, that spread so quickly and rapidly across not just not just to the medical community,
but through through populations and governments in general.
Let's talk a bit more about this reaction from wider society and the impact of Jenny's discovery.
Generous, swift to go into publication with his findings right at the end of the 18th century.
And very quickly, his ideas are not only welcomed and supported, but they also spread.
So they spread very rapidly around Europe. He is praised by individuals ranging from the senior members of the royal Saudi medicine all the
way to Napoleon and the pope who consider him and his achievements worthy of the greatest praise.
So he very much his methods swiftly follow as well.
And so and to the extent that they are taken up on on on a mass scale really throughout in certain countries,
and then, of course, they do spreads very rapidly also across to the United States as well.
You know, it's interesting to reflect on the fact that this is a time that Britain was at war regularly with France.
And yet it's also a time when Napoleon singles out general for particular praise as a man whose
contributions essentially are some of the greatest to health that have ever been better be made.
And the praise with Rich or the esteem with which Napoleon, in which humble opinion holds, generally even leads to the release of British prisoners.
But you also find individual such as the pope as well, praising Jennifer for his contributions.
And it's very much European wide phenomenon that he is at the centre all at the same time.
The disease is still being distinguished by something that comes from elsewhere.
By this point and then as it's as it starts to decline in Europe as a consequence of vaccination,
it is associated increasingly of being a disease of other parts of the world, other parts of colonies and those sorts of.
I heard that initially the Royal Society didn't entirely approve of Jenna's work.
Yeah, that's true. Think they did. So the Royal Society initially were hostile and warned him that that wasn't the sort of thing that
he should be going where there wasn't it wasn't exactly gonna be a career at the very staff,
wasn't going to be a career enhancing statements.
But then very rapidly when says proof with you, I became clear the evidence for his claims became clear.
Then they then they turned around. I was curious as to whether the general public reaction at the time was overwhelmingly positive or more varied.
You know, there are still mixed reactions to Janna's findings and his his grapes,
his great discoveries and the scientific evidence that he's presenting.
There are people who distrust the idea that anything from animal could alter human health or even should be used, you know?
So there's even there is a religious some religious hesitancy amongst religious groups, Madison,
hesitancy amongst religious groups about whether this is really what makes medical men should be doing in terms
of perhaps upsetting God's work by fiddling about with more bodies and then injecting things into human bodies.
So there's there's a bit of that. There's also some what wants the cost of it becomes clear.
There is there is considerable resistance, partly because of the cost.
And that's poor Mexican society just cannot cannot afford it.
And they resent this intrusion into their lives of of of the states.
There are also parallels that there are also some concerns about the effectiveness of the vaccine.
For example, there are documented cases, of course, of people quite early on.
Of people becoming no longer immune. And this is a feature of the vaccine in that it did not make people did not give people lifelong immunity.
It gave them temporary music.
So after about 10 years or so, when that immunes began to wear off, there were those who felt that it was something that could not be trusted.
And at the same time, there there are cases of people being infected and injected with vaccine that was not clean and was not sterile.
And there were complications because of that. People didn't trust the purity of the vaccine.
And I think all of these have parallels today in amongst those who are members of various anti vaccine movements.
This sounded rather like our modern experience with an organised anti vaccine
movement casting suspicion on what Jenner and his contemporaries were doing.
You do see perhaps more debates and discussion about the pros and cons of vaccines.
But his very presence coming in at the 17th century beginning the 18th, you see some discussion,
a growing movement of individuals who are hesitant about inoculation and vaccination.
They are suspicious of governments. Clearly, governments state intervention into the lives of individuals because they fear
that inoculation and vaccination of of people is not necessarily a safe,
safe way for. So it's quite interesting that you do see these resonant emotions appearing in sources that are 200 years, 250 years old.
And they do speak quite clearly today to similar fears about.
About vaccines.
With smallpox being so prevalent and such a big story at the time, I wondered why I hadn't seen it reflected much in art from the period.
You know, you don't have a reason to go around painting somebody with smallpox and say someone like Lady Mary Montagu,
who famously brought back the idea of inoculation, or at least her idea from Turkey,
from Constantinople early in the 18th century, and was played a very important part in publicising inoculation,
vaccination practises, first in England and then and then elsewhere in Europe.
She herself had had smallpox and had been disfigured by it.
In a sense. I think she had she had no eyebrow eyelashes or eyebrows and these things left in her face.
Her skin was was was was badly affected.
But if you do if you look at paintings, of course, they are humble, complimentary, and they don't pick up on that sort of stuff.
Because you know what painter with that, you know, the reality,
the real the the authenticity of which artists in the 20th century particular paints you may not see when it's
when they when they commission to do paintings of the great Indigo did come down smallpox in 19th century,
19th century. I was also interested in the extent to which smallpox was a disease of the poor, not the rich.
Class has an interesting relationship to smallpox, particularly in England and Europe at this time,
partly because if you compare it to what came before inoculation, it's it's it's a strange situation.
And that's often the the the more wealthy classes would have access to funds with
which they could spend on the whole host of strange remedies that were available,
such as purging exposure to extreme heat, exposure to extreme colds, that kind of thing.
Rich Thomas Sydenham, who is a great, great proponent of an advocate of skilled practitioner in the time,
claimed that actually this was more harmful to those classes because they were being that they were the most,
if you like, of untrained spam specialists who were unable to provide skilled and effective medical treatments,
whereas the poor just had to contend with smallpox on its own.
And he felt that that was perhaps a more favourable situation to be in.
And he felt that the best practitioner as far as smallpox treatment is concerned was someone who did the bare minimum in terms of treatment.
So that's one side of things. But then also, of course, to be able to go to a medical man, a practitioner, whether professional or not,
seeking a solution to not seeking some sort of treatment you would have to pay for.
So even with inoculation, you would have to pay for that.
So there is still a degree to which the poorer sections of society still remain
unable to access the types of treatment that actually worked at that time.
Moving on to the end of its outbreak and indeed this disease, even though Jenah had been pioneering vaccination back in the 18th century,
it wasn't until recently, indeed, when I was a student here that the world was finally rid of smallpox.
Yeah, it is a long time. So it's you know, it's 180 years or so before more boxes eradicated.
And that's the reasons for that. Quite, quite complex and and also numerous.
But smallpox after Janna's vaccination is techniques are publicised.
Smallpox continues. It is still there isn't disease in other parts of the world.
A great killer has a terrible impact on society, continues to have this cause the same dread that you saw in Europe from 16,
17, 18 centuries before vaccination became common.
So it remains a very significant problem in parts of the world that do not necessarily matter so much,
if you like, to Western and imperial governments and countries.
So it takes a while for for smallpox vaccination to spread decisively around the world.
And it's really the post-war wells in the 20th century when you find.
Some discussion and then calls for a united worldwide efforts by the WTO to try to eradicate smallpox.
But a lot has changed by then.
So one of the key factors involved in eradicating smallpox that is now, which makes it possible, is that the smallpox vaccine is now by the 1950s,
1960s is a free freeze dried vaccine, which can be held room temperature,
whereas most vaccines today have to be held to be stored in the cold and have to be treated very carefully.
The smallpox vaccine could essentially be left at room temperature for four months on end and would still be effective to be.
You say it was ideal for more than any other remedy that had been contemplated.
It was ideal for for it for use in countries that were hard to navigate.
It took time to move around and in which it took time to track and trace everyone.
And the number of organisations, not least the World Health Organisation, have played a huge role in this story.
So Joe is one in a in a line of organisations that are dedicated to the health, improving the health to the public health of multiple countries.
So the League of Nations in the 1920s and 30s had a medical division and sought to improve public health in various parts of the world.
You also see private institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation engaging in public health programmes in various corners of the world.
So there were examples that existed before the Second World War of international efforts to tackle all kinds of of disease.
And the Second World War just underlines that need for collaboration and cooperation and the of countries working together,
nations working together to tackle what we must remember are not national problems.
The disease crosses borders. It hasn't. No, it's no great respecter of of nationality or national borders.
So an organisation like the show with a global agreement was something that made sense in terms of the evolution of what institutions like this.
And it was backed by by a vast number of countries in that post-war post-war period
and that it engages on public health programmes in various corners of the world.
But it's smallpox eradication programme at the end of 1950s is really, I think,
one of the if not the most striking and successful public health programmes in history.
In terms of the success that resulted, though, it's Roderic and then Brian and blotchy outline.
We shouldn't underestimate how difficult it is to eradicate a disease entirely.
It's very difficult to stress enough how hard it is to stop a pandemic, particularly when a virus is concerned.
Smallpox was eradicated for some fairly unique reasons.
One I mentioned before is that the vaccine was extremely effective.
Although we might think that the W8 Joe and the fact that they started this programme is the key factor.
It really is the fact that the vaccine that was in place in 1960s,
70s was extremely effective and could be stored in a very end and handled in a very, very useful way, which most vaccines cartons.
And another feature, which is ironic considering this is one of the most horrible features of this,
of the disease, which is its disfiguring quality, its ability to hökmark permanently face and to cause blindness.
These features and the fact that it manifests itself as a terrible postulating a fact which which is very much focussed on
on the face and and the extremities of particular face this awful dreaded disease where the WHL set about searching for.
In cases in Africa and then in particular in India, they were helped greatly by the fact that somebody who was ill with smallpox was relatively
easy to find because communities would be well aware of who was ill and who was not ill.
But today, of course, where we have a virus,
where we're still understanding the symptoms and invariably they're not symptoms that are easily discernable.
They are not ones that that are quite so glaring and identifiable as those that characterise smallpox.
It's very tempting these days to pare back into the past, to look at lessons from from previous epidemics and previous pandemics.
But we need to draw the right ones and we have to be careful. We don't exaggerate someone's successes in the past and overlook some of the
difficulties and some of the challenges which were in place during those periods. A.
Virus is a big sign, she said.
We as a nation before DNA viruses, so they don't mutate very much and it's only in humans, so it's human to human transmission.
So there's no animal reservoir for it to hide. So it was a good target to try to eliminate with a vaccine.
So the development of the vaccine and wide deployment with the vaccine to eliminate it.
Finally, this one of only two infectious diseases have ever been eradicated so far.
So small pox and rinderpest. I did say that the last naturally occurring case was diagnosed in October 1977.
It's worth mentioning that in 1978, Janet Parker, who was a medical photographer who worked at the Bevin,
a medical school, became the last recorded person to die from smallpox.
Essentially, it was thought to be eradicated really at this point. And initially she was misdiagnosed as having chicken pox.
However, there was a lot of international interest unconsented w.h.
And it turned out that Professor Henry Budson headed the smallpox laboratory at the Birmingham Medical School.
And this is where she worked. And there was only a handful of commission WHL research facilities that still had smallpox virus samples, essentially.
So it was clear that the smallpox virus must have escaped from his laboratory.
One of the theories is that it came through the vents, but no one really knows as she ended up dying.
And both her parents and so ends up getting ill and being quarantined. And sadly, due to the guilt and the pressure, the professor took his own life.
And in that case, though,
it was a lesson that even eradicate infectious diseases can pose a threat as long as they're being kept in some labs in the world.
And, of course, as you said, the risk of bioterrorism. And that's why smallpox is still quite interesting to us.
And on that subject, Roderick left us with a final warning.
Smallpox would make a deadly weapon if a nefarious state or group was tempted to use it.
Because it's the perfect disease.
The fact that it exists anymore, unless, you know, unless you consider the fact that it's on to, you know, it's in it's in it's very secure.
It's preserved and very secure positions in labs in the US and Russia.
But should it be extracted from those or should it be?
If it's if it's constructed as a disease in a lab?
If it was Re-created, which is not impossible, it would be a highly effective biological warfare weapon,
because not only because it's so contagious, but because it's so distressing.
It's such a terrifying disease, because as we discussed, it affects it affects the body and it affects the face.
So it is very much something that literally is a terror weapon.
You know? Next time on future anchors, we move on to another disease that many may think has disappeared like smallpox,
which sadly is still endemic in many countries, namely cholera.
We'll discuss a major outbreak in the 19th century.
Why someone called Jon Snow, probably not the one you're thinking may or may not be central to that story.
And what a water pump in the centre of London has to do with anything.
I hope you can join me then for the next episode of our History of Pandemics season.
I'm Peter Milliken, and you've been listening to Future Makers.
Future Makers was created in-house at the University of Oxford and presented by Professor Peter Milliken from Hartford College.
Our voice set to today was Anna Wilson. The school for the series was designed and created by me.
Richard Watts and the series is written and produced by Ben Harwood and Steve Pritchard.
Thank you. On behalf of the whole team for listening to the history of Pandemic's.
COVA, 19, has exposed the deep flaws in our relationship with the world and each other.
We all long for a return to normality, but is back to normal.
Really what we want? We need to seise this moment to reimagine our systems.
And that's exactly what we'll do in the new series of REIMAGINE, which we're calling Systems Reset.
In this series, you'll meet the visionaries who are revolutionising the story of who we are and how we engage with the world.
We are dumping on the future. We had dumphy ecological degradation. We adopt a technological risk.
I think we have stock talk about this talk of a new human dimensional relationship near human potential and Walcott's foster.
We'll talk about how to thrive in an entangled ecosystem, redesigning public health and economic systems,
the kind of leadership we need in the 21st century and much more.
It's time to summon our moral imaginations and create systems that are fit for purpose.
It's time for a declaration of interdependence. So join me.
Peter Drawback for Reimagine a podcast from the school's Centre for Social Entrepreneurship
in Oxford reimagined a podcast about people who are inventing the future.