Primary Sources: Plagues, Epidemics, & Pandemics: Smallpox

"BRITONS VACCINATED IN SMALLPOX SCARE: By the tens of thousands the British flock to health centers to be innoculated after five deaths from smallpox are reported. The spread of the disease is traced to a carrier from Pakistan."

"The Global Health Chronicles is a collection of materials on public health efforts to prevent, control and eradicate global disease. A collaboration between the David J. Sencer CDC Museum at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Emory University, the site was designed for a range of users, from casual readers to serious researchers. Users may access new and rarely-seen materials through this searchable database."

"Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) was the wife of the British Ambassador to Turkey. In 1715 she had survived but been terribly scarred by smallpox while her brother had died from the disease. She was fascinated by the culture of the Ottoman Empire and in 1717 described the Turkish practice of inoculating healthy children with a weakened strain of smallpox to confer immunity from the more virulent strains of the disease. She immediately had her seven-year old son inoculated in Turkey and on her return to England, she had her daughter publicly inoculated at the royal court of George I to popularize the technique. In this she was only partially successful as inoculation continued to be dangerous and often resulted in death and scarring of infected children."

"In this letter to the Continental Congress, General George Washington passed along information he received from a sailor. It was believed that British General William Howe was sending people out from Boston who had been deliberately infected with smallpox, so that they might pass on the disease to Americans in the surrounding area. Washington believed this to be a form of bioterrorism."

"Between 1775 and 1782 a smallpox epidemic swept through North America, shaping the course of the American Revolution and decimating native communities across the continent. A research and teaching tool, Pox Americana allows users to watch the epidemic unfold and read the accounts of those who witnessed (and survived) its devastating effects. The seed data for Pox Americana was compiled by University of Colorado historian Elizabeth Fenn for her book, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82."

"George Washington wrote this letter to Lt. Colonel David Grier on March 12, 1777. In it, Washington instructs Grier to send new soldiers to Philadelphia so they could be inoculated for smallpox. Washington wanted to make sure that his troops were not affected by disease, and he believed that inoculation would help with that. So, just before this letter was written, Washington created a mandated system of inoculating his soldiers."

Jenner’s famed papers detailing his discovery of the small pox vaccination, which has led to the eradication of the disease from the planet.

"...provides access to remarkable and wide-ranging materials digitized as part of a multi-year project to make available to the world more than 700,000 digitized pages of all known archival and manuscript materials in the Harvard Library that relate to 17th- and 18th-century North America. Each item is connected to countless stories—of lives lived quietly and extravagantly, of encounters peaceful and volatile, and of places near and far – providing an opportunity to travel back in time, to rethink familiar stories, and to discover new ones."