Variolation
The procedure was most commonly carried out by inserting/rubbing powdered smallpox scabs or fluid from pustules into superficial scratches made in the skin.
[citation needed] The method was first used in China, India, parts of Africa and the Middle East before it was introduced into England and North America in the 1720s in the face of some opposition.
Further confusion was caused when, in 1891, Louis Pasteur honoured Jenner by widening the terms vaccine/vaccination to refer to the artificial induction of immunity against any infectious disease.
[citation needed] The term "inoculation" entered medical English through horticultural usage meaning to graft a bud (or eye) from one plant into another.
The practice of using scabs from epidemic patients was seen as beneficial by some, but others were convinced of its danger; the Kangxi Emperor approved of it and inoculated both his children and his regular troops.
The rumor that vaccination was documented in India before the discoveries of Edward Jenner, widespread since the nineteenth century, can be traced to propaganda tracts written in Sanskrit and the Indian vernaculars by colonial officers, designed to convince pious Indians to accept the newly discovered Jennerian procedure and abandon older variolation practices.
[18] After coming across the practice in Constantinople, the physician Emmanuel Timoni wrote a letter describing the method in detail which was later published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1714 and read to the Royal Society.
The report caught the attention of a Bostonian minister, Cotton Mather who mentions an encounter in 1707 with a Garamante from Libya named Onesimus.
While in the Ottoman Empire she came across the process of variolation as it was introduced and published in Constantinople by two Greek doctors, Emmanuel Timoni and Iacob Pylarino.
However, variolation caused the death of Prince Octavius of Great Britain, eighth son and thirteenth child of King George III in 1783.
Part of its success was founded on statistical observation, which confirmed that variolation was a safer alternative to contracting smallpox naturally, strengthened by the assumption that it protected against the disease for life.
[16]: 22 The success of their method lay in a shallow scratch, careful selection of only mildly affected donors, and no bleeding or extreme purging.
He would then dry it using peat smoke (which was believed to lessen the virus's virulence),[25]: 401 and bury it in the ground with camphor[23]: 571 (which has anti-bacterial properties, preventing the matter from decomposing).
[23]: 571 In contrast to contemporaneous quack doctors, Notions would not stipulate any particular resting conditions (such as "hot-treatment" – heating the ill patient in front of a fire, covering them with blankets and allowing them no fresh-air),[25]: 398 nor would he administer any other medicines during the period of infection and recovery.
Thomas Dimsdale, a prominent banker, politician, and physician, was invited to visit St Petersburg to variolate Catherine the Great.
In case Dimsdale's variolations had ended badly, Catherine had arranged a relay of horses to carry them safely out of the country.
It was not until an outbreak of smallpox in Paris in 1752 nearly killed the heir to the French throne that the public embraced the practice after seeing the prince variolated.
This led Japanese physician Ogata Shunsaku [ja] to variolate children using a human smallpox vaccination method during an outbreak in Chikuzen Province from 1789 to 1790.
By the end of the eighteenth century, variolation had gained widespread global respect and was thought to be one of the greatest medical successes of its time.
It had become the subject of serious medical study, leading physicians like John Haygarth from Chester, England, to explore its application on a larger scale.
However, with suitable modifications, such as the substitution of vaccination for variolation, it was remarkably similar to the strategy adopted during the World Health Organization's smallpox eradication campaign.
Documentation of variolation in the Americas may be traced back to 1706 in Boston, where Puritan minister Cotton Mather learned of the technique from his West African slave Onesimus.
Mather was able to implement this new method in 1721 when Boston suffered a smallpox outbreak,[32] although others such as William Douglass strongly opposed the idea.
By the end of the American Revolutionary War, variolation had gained widespread acceptance in the larger cities and towns of the United States.
These cases were a result of a lapse of immune "memory"[citation needed], while others may have been misdiagnosed (experts often confused smallpox with chickenpox).
Many physicians failed to take note of local redness and discharge to assure the variolation had taken, resulting in inadequate treatment.
From the 1760s, a number of individuals, including John Fewster, Peter Plett, Benjamin Jesty, and particularly Edward Jenner, were interested in the use of material from cowpox, an animal infection, to protect against smallpox.
During the World Health Organization's Smallpox Eradication Campaign, vaccination teams came across variolators in remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan and their samples were confiscated.
[21]: 1173–77 Although variolation has ceased, it has influenced the concept of other traditional practices, such as "pox parties", in which children are intentionally exposed to diseases like chickenpox, measles and rubella, in an attempt to gain immunity.
[37]: 73 While intentional exposure has been rejected as a strategy to combat COVID-19 because of the risks involved, there is also a hypothesis that widespread to universal use of face coverings is associated with a higher proportion of asymptomatic or relatively mild infections because of the decreased dose of viral particles expelled or received by the wearer, as a welcome addition to their primary purpose of significantly reducing transmission by asymptomatic wearers.
