For centuries, the smallpox disease claimed the lives of huge numbers of people around the world. In the early 1700s, the famed French writer and philosopher Voltaire estimated that 60% of the population of England contracted smallpox at one point or another, and 20% of the total population died from the disease. But today, the disease is, thankfully, effectively eradicated. That is because of a vaccine developed by an English physician named Edward Jenner in 1796. It took nearly two hundred years, but Jenner’s vaccine ultimately made it around the globe; the last known case of the disease dates back to 1978. That’s a long time, but it could have been longer — if it weren’t for the controversial idea of a Spanish doctor named Francisco Javier de Balmis. Jenner’s critical discovery was that exposure to pus from cowpox — a disease which is similar to smallpox but much milder — would immunize a person against smallpox. By 1800, word of his discovery spread through most of Western Europe, and later, to the Americas. Demand for the vaccine quickly followed. But the vaccine required a live cowpox virus, and the world of the early 1800s didn’t have airplanes or any other way … Continue reading The Smallpox Boat