Rita Monaldi - Veritas

Obviously subcutaneous inoculation can also be carried out with intentions that are not preventive but criminal — using a more lethal form of the virus.

Timoni reports the presence in Constantinople of two old female fortune-tellers of Greek origin, known as the Thessalian and the Philippoupolis, who had been carrying out inoculations in the Ottoman capital on the “Frankish” — which is to say, non-Muslim — population since the end of the seventeenth century. The Muslims refused to be inoculated. In 1701 and 1709, a few years after this practice had begun to spread in the city, Constantinople suffered the first mass outbreaks of death from smallpox. However, the two fortune-tellers were not lynched but acclaimed. Certain well-known doctors had arrived declaring that without the intervention of the two Greek women the epidemic would have been even worse. And very soon this notion was endorsed by the local clergy, which opened the way for inoculation en masse .

The year after the events reported by Timoni, in 1714, the Venetian ambassador in Constantinople reported the practice of inoculation in his work Nova et tuta variolas excitandi per transplantationem methodus nuper inventa et in usum tracta .

Subcutaneous inoculation spread throughout Europe two years later, between 1716 and 1718, when the wife of the English ambassador in Constantinpole, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, officially imported it from Turkey into England. On her travels she promoted inoculation in all the European courts with great enthusiasm, even having her own children inoculated. In 1716 she passed through Vienna, where, as her diary informs us, she met Joseph’s widow and daughters. In 1720 in England she persuaded the King to have some prisoners inoculated. From 1723 inoculation became widespread.

However, in those same years, smallpox, rather than getting weaker, ceased to be a “benign illness” and became mortal in almost all cases. It was no longer considered an infant disease. The symptoms were much more serious than those described in the preceding centuries and above all were unmistakeably hideous: there was no longer any likelihood of confusing the horrible smallpox pustules with those of chickenpox or, even less likely, with the little red spots of measles.

Marco Cesare Nannini’s essay, La storia del vaiolo (Modena 1963), provides some terrifying statistics. In the twenty-five years following upon the introduction of inoculation, 10 per cent of the world’s population died. There were numerous cases of haemorrhagic smallpox. Inoculation soon proved to be an excellent instrument of colonial conquest: the Indians of America were decimated in this fashion, from the Redskins to the Indios. E. Bertarelli ( Jenner e la scoperta della vaccinazione , Milan 1932) reports that in Santo Domingo alone, for example, 60 per cent of the population died in the space of a few months. In Haiti, smallpox, imported in 1767, rapidly killed two-thirds of the inhabitants; in Greenland it exterminated three-quarters of the population in 1733.

In Europe, between the introduction of subcutaneous inoculation and the end of the eighteenth century, sixty million people died of smallpox (H.J. Parish, A History of Immunization , London 1965, p. 21). At the end of the eighteenth century very similar estimates were formulated (D. Faust, Communication au congrès de Rastadt sur l’extirpation de la petite vérole , 1798, Archives Nationaux de France , F8 124). In 1716 smallpox caused 14,000 deaths in Paris, and another 20,000 in 1723; in 1756 mass deaths occurred in Russia, as they had done in 1730 in England, where in little more than four decades 80,505 deaths were recorded from smallpox; in Naples, in 1768, in a few weeks, there were 6,000 deaths; in Rome, in 1762, another 6,000; in Modena, in 1778, following upon a single instance of subcutaneous inoculation, an epidemic was unleashed that decimated the city in the space of eight months; in Amsterdam, in 1784, there were 2,000 deaths; in Germany in 1798, 42,379; in Berlin alone, in 1766, 1,077 deaths; in London, in 1763, 3,528. England did great business with inoculation: Daniel Sutton had founded a flourishing inoculation business, with branches that spread to the remote western territories of New England and Jamaica during the second half of the century.

How many people died from smallpox before inoculation? A few examples from London: 38 deaths in 1666, 60 in 1684, 82 in 1636. In short, hardly any.

At the court of Vienna, before Joseph’s case, smallpox had struck only Ferdinand IV. But after Joseph the disease exploded, and by the end of the eighteenth century it had killed nine more Habsburgs. There were countless cases of haemorrhagic smallpox in those years, and all ended with the death of the patient.

Here are two descriptions of the illness for the sake of comparison. The first is by Scipione Mercuri, the famous Roman doctor who lived from 1540 to 1615 ( La commare , Venezia 1676, libro terzo, cap. XXIV, p. 276, Delle Varole e cura loro ), and therefore prior to the introduction of inoculation. It will be noted that Mercuri, too, considers smallpox and measles as similar (he deals with them extensively also in De morbis puerorum , lib. I, De variolis et de morbillis , Venetiis, 1588).

The second description of smallpox is by Doctor Faust, taken from the essay already cited of 1798, and therefore at the height of the vaccinatory euphoria.

Here is Mercuri:

I will now deal with the universal external illnesses; and first of all the commonest, which is the ‘roviglione’ known in this country as ‘varole’. Between ‘varole’ and measles there are some differences: nonetheless because both of them receive the same treatment, I will deal with them together . ‘Roviglioni’ or ‘varole’ are little pustules, or blisters, which break out all over the body, particularly spontaneously with pain, itching and fever, and when they break they become sores. . The signs that pre-announce their arrival are stomach ache, hoarseness, redness in the face, headache, copious sneezing. The signs that reveal them as having already arrived are delirium, little pustules or blisters over the whole body, now white, now red, now larger, now smaller, depending on the different bodies of the patients . ‘Varole’ for the most part do not kill, except occasionally when, either because of the air or due to other mistakes committed by the doctors, as many people die as in a plague .

And here is Faust’s description in 1798:

With countless pustules, smallpox presses in from head to foot. It is as if the body is immersed in boiling oil, the pain is atrocious. With suppuration, the face becomes monstrously swollen and disfigured; the eyes are closed, the throat enflamed, blocked and unable to swallow water which the rale demands incessantly. The invalid is therefore deprived at the same time of light, air and water; his eyes emit pus and tears; the lungs exhale a fetid smell; the dribble turns acrid and involuntary; the excrement corrupt and purulent, and the urine is equally thick. The body is all pus and pustules and cannot move or be touched; it moans and lies motionless, while the part on which it lies is often gangrenous .

There is an equally horrific verse description that Abbot Jean-Joseph Roman wrote in 1773 in his poem L’inoculation about a sufferer from smallpox:

A pain not felt before attacks him now,

His eyes are filled with seething scorching liquid;

And dribble, running from his foaming mouth,

Does naught to quench the thirst that burns his palate:

He has no longer use of his chained senses,