Mozart and smallpox

Smallpox in 18th-century Europe was a devastating disease, recurring frequently in epidemics and killing or disfiguring millions of people.

Thus, many parents felt that they would rather do nothing, risking future smallpox arriving at random, rather than carry out a deliberate act that might well kill their children immediately.

However, since in Leopold's day it was not firmly established that inoculation was beneficial,[6] his remarks can be seen to be more of appeal to religion to resolve what must have seemed an impossible dilemma.

[7] The Mozart family (Wolfgang, his father Leopold, his mother Anna Maria, and his older sister Nannerl) left their home in Salzburg for Vienna on 11 September 1767.

[8] They had been there before, exhibiting the children's talents, in 1762;[9] by this time they had completed their "Grand Tour" of Europe, performing in England, France, and elsewhere, and hoped to achieve even greater recognition (and income) in the Imperial capital.

[10] The imperial bride-to-be Maria Josepha caught the disease in October and died of it on the 15th, the day after she had been scheduled to be married.

[8] In the following week, presumably before the onset of his illness, the 11-year-old composer wrote an inexplicably cheerful elegy, a fragmentary duet for two sopranos in F major (K. Anh.24a/43a) to an anonymous text: Ach, was müssen wir erfahren!

Count Schrattenbach invited them to give a concert, but Leopold, impelled by an "inner urge," wanted to go farther, and the family continued northward after two days[16] to Olmütz (today Olomouc).

In a letter written much later (1800), his sister Nannerl reported: He caught the smallpox, which made him so ill that he could see nothing for nine days and had to spare his eyes for several weeks after his recovery.

[24] During his recovery, Wolfgang, who needed to spare his eyes, spent the time learning card tricks and fencing.

[29] The experience of losing three of her children to smallpox led Empress Maria Theresa to become a convert to inoculation.

The inoculations performed with this weakened strain on the imperial family were successful, and led to greater public acceptance for the procedure.

[30] Smallpox struck the Mozart family again in the next generation: Nannerl's eldest son Leopold and two of her stepchildren caught the disease during an outbreak in the Salzburg area in 1787.

[31] In 1796, the discovery of vaccination—the use of the related cowpox virus to immunize against smallpox—by Edward Jenner revolutionized the ability of medicine to deal with smallpox.

One of the doctors trained in the Vienna campaign, named Doutrepout, then brought vaccination to Mozart's native city of Salzburg.

According to Halliwell, "popular resistance was fierce," and both the government and the Roman Catholic Church (previously an opponent) took stern measures to promote vaccination.