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Smallpox
Scourge Of The Colonies,
A Frequent Visitor To New England

While our brethren to the South struggle with the feared Malaria, New England continues to be the victim of repeated Smallpox epidemics. 

Common in England, it arrives cloaked by the scores of newcomers who then visit it upon the colony.  Governor Bradford describes its effects upon the Plymouth Indians in horrific detail and concludes, "they fall into a lamentable condition . . .and die like rotten sheep."   Fatal to the Indians, sometimes exceeding a 90 percent mortality rate, the dread "distemper" is only somewhat less kind to citizens as it sweeps through the colonies at unpredictable intervals devastating entire families, communities and commerce.  Smallpox has claimed victims across all class boundaries including  Deacon Samuel Fuller in 1633

The disease was first documented in China in 1122, by the name variola.

The smallpox virus is described as a "mostly fatal" disease that runs its course fairly quickly. After initially inhaling the virus from an infected person, his clothes or bedding, the classic smallpox symptoms appear quickly. A few days after exposure, sever headaches, backaches, chills and a fever up to 105 degrees develop. Three to four days later, these symptoms may decline, but are replaced by a rash of hard red lumps. These lumps begin developing on the bodies extremities and then spread to the rest of the body. This rash continues to develop into small blisters that itch and are extremely painful. On the twelfth day, if the patient survives, the blisters scab over and leave permanent pitted scars.

One physician describes his patient who did not survive:  "The smallpox came out by the thousands on his face which soon became one entire blister, and in two of three days after the body and limbs were beset with such numbers of them that the load bore down his strength before it in spite of every measure taken for his assistance.  "

So reviled is the disease that the infected have been known to be abandoned, sent to "pest" houses, and fearfully buried in common graves.

Among "cures" suggested are those of "A Brief Rule to Guide the Common-People of New-England How to Order Themselves and Theirs in the Small Pocks, or Measels," by Reverend Thomas Thacher, Old South Church, Boston.  Rev. Thacher suggests that as soon as the disease appears, "Let the sick abstein from Flesh and Wine, and open Air, let him use small Bear warmed with a Tost for his ordinary drink, and moderately when he desires it."  Suggested foodstuffs are  water-gruel, water-potage, boild Apples, and milk, none of which should "manifest a hot quality." 

A more radical and hotly debated cure of European origin  proposed by Rev. Cotton Mather, is that of "innoculation," or the purposeful introduction of the disease so as to bring on a mild case of the disease and leave the patient henceforth immune.    Mather's concept was at first heatedly debated and scorned by many of the medical community who scoffed at his lack of medical credentials. 

In the recent 1721-22 epidemic, however, Mather and his clericals surreptitiously performed numerous inoculations.  Victoriously, Mather proclaimed the procedure's veracity. Nearly 900 died who had no inoculation. Of about 300 persons who had inoculations, only five or six died, those possibly already infected with the disease before inoculation.