Friday, September 25, 2020

The Romance of 18th Century Science: Smallpox!

 

"File:Portrait of Lady Mary Wortley Montague
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Smallpox was a dread disease in the eighteenth century. The fatality rate is estimated to have been between 20% and 60%, and higher still in infants. Those who survived were often scarred; some were blind. 

Dr. Parkins pretty much sums up the value of the treatments available for smallpox (The English Physician, 1810): Alkanet root “…is as gallant a remedy to drive out the small pox and measles as any is…” The practice of medicine still relied largely on the writings of the ancients, and trusted in the four bodily humors and astrology. 


But almost a century earlier, a woman contributed the first means of prevention of smallpox in England. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is remembered for her letters and for pioneering smallpox inoculation. During a stay in Turkey with her husband, the British ambassador at Constantinople, Lady Mary learned of the Turkish folk medicine practice of inoculation for smallpox. Pus from a smallpox blister would be applied to a scratch on the arm or leg, resulting in a mild case of the disease. Lady Mary’s son was the first English person to undergo inoculation, Lady Mary having survived smallpox some years before. 

In 1721, she had her daughter inoculated during a smallpox outbreak in England, and Caroline, Princess of Wales, was persuaded to sponsor a test of the treatment. Seven condemned Newgate prisoners were offered the opportunity to accept inoculation to escape their sentence. All survived.

The same year, the Massachusetts Bay Colony city of Boston also suffered a smallpox epidemic. Cotton Mather, infamous for his role in the Salem witch trials, had read a journal article about inoculation, and had also heard about a slave’s boyhood inoculation. He convinced Dr. Zabdiel Boylston to perform an experiment in the practice, which was witnessed by Benjamin Franklin, who subsequently supported inoculation.

Jonathan Edwards, theologian and president of what would eventually be called Princeton University (best known for his sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God), underwent inoculation during the Princeton smallpox epidemic in 1757-1758. He was one of the unlucky ones whose resulting illness was severe and it led to his death.

In 1777, George Washington had all his soldiers inoculated as a precaution against the disease, typically a greater danger than the enemy—especially since the British troops had all been inoculated. Low Continental losses to smallpox may have contributed to the Revolution’s success.

Edward Jenner, born in 1749, was inoculated at the age of eight. At thirteen, he was apprenticed to a country surgeon and apothecary. Sometime during his training, he heard a dairymaid say, “I shall never have smallpox for I have had cowpox. I shall never have an ugly pockmarked face.” 

Anecdotal reports among country folk had long held that dairymaids who had had cowpox did not get smallpox. Benjamin Jesty, a Dorset farmer, who vaccinated his wife and children during a smallpox epidemic in 1774 was only one of half a dozen amateur of science who had tested this idea. 

At the end of his apprenticeship, Jenner studied under a surgeon at St. George’s Hospital in London. John Hunter was interested in all forms of science and was an experimental scientist as well as being a respected surgeon. Jenner’s memory of the dairymaid’s words, and his training and friendship with Hunter very likely led to his experiment in May, 1796. He took matter from a dairymaid with fresh cowpox lesions and used it to inoculate a young boy, who contracted a mild case lasting for almost ten days. Two months later, the doctor inoculated the boy with fresh smallpox material. The child showed no effects, leading Dr. Jenner to conclude the cowpox inoculation was successful. 

In a letter of October 11, 1798, John Fewster, Surgeon, wrote to a fellow surgeon that during an attempt to inoculate for smallpox in his area thirty years earlier, he found a number of his patients could not be infected with even a mild case of the disease. After several attempts to inoculate him, a farmer who swore he had never had smallpox told Dr. Fewster, “I have had the Cow pox lately to a violent degree, if that' s any odds.” 

On further enquiry, Fewster found that those in whom inoculation had failed had all had cowpox, and he communicated this information to a medical society to which he belonged. An Inquiry Concerning the History of the Cowpox, Principally with a View to Supersede and Extinguish the Smallpox (London, England: J. Johnson, January, 1798).

In 1798, Jenner published An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, a disease discovered in some of the western counties of England, particularly Gloucestershire and Known by the Name of Cow Pox. His large scale 1799 survey connecting infection with cowpox to immunity to smallpox proved the efficacy of “vaccination” as he called it (from the Latin word vaccinus, meaning “from cows”). 
"Scalpels" by Thomas Fisher
Rare Book Library, UofT 
is licensed under 
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This was a significant step forward in medicine. Vaccination spread quickly in England and soon reached Europe as well. Of course, some opposed it as unnecessary, unsafe, or government interference. But between 1838 and 1842, deaths from smallpox plummeted from 1,064 deaths per million inhabitants to 168 deaths per million (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107397/smallpox-death-rate-britain-historical/). Upticks and downticks in fatalities occurred throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, including a spike of 1,012 deaths per million in the epidemic of 1871. But with the exception of 1871, the trend was downward, until in 1900 there were only three deaths per million of population.

Friday, September 18, 2020

The Romance of 18th Century Science: The Grotto of the Dogs


Ah, the romance of the eighteenth century: beautiful clothing, formal manners, elegance. These are the characteristics we usually associate with that period[1]. All those things existed. We may also know of non-existent sewerage, disease, unspeakable poverty, and crime. We don’t tend to think of the Enlightenment’s lively interest in science (or natural philosophy, as it was called). Yet experiment and discovery were not limited to academics or even to the privileged classes. Anyone who could read could take part if they wished[2]

Originally I meant to write a short, zippy post about eighteenth century science in general. But the more I read about it, the more there was to write about. So instead I’m writing about one of the many amateurs of natural philosophy. Joseph Addison (1672-1719), co-founder of the The Spectator magazine, conducted a series of experiments while touring Italy and described them in his travel book, Remarks on several parts of Italy, &c., in the years 1701, 1702, 1703.

Visiting the Grotto del cani (sometimes spelled “Grotta del cane”) near Naples, he described the poisonous steams found within a foot of the water’s surface, and the common experiments conducted there. He wrote that a dog having its nose held in the vapors “loses all signs of life (i.e., lost consciousness) in a very short time” but would revive if taken into the open air or thrown into the nearby lake. A torch held in the vapors would be extinguished in a moment, and a pistol could not be fired. He found this fascinating and devised his own experiments. 

“I split a Reed, and laid in the Channel of it a Train of Ġun-powder, so that one End of the Reed was above the Vapour, and the other at the Bottom of it; and I found, tho’ the Steam was strong enough to hinder a Pistol from taking fire in it, and to quench a lighted Torch, that it could not intercept the Train of Fire when it had once begun flashing, nor hinder it from running to the very End.” He repeated this experiment several times and found that doing so reduced the vapor enough that it was possible to fire a pistol in it.

He made a number of other observations about the vapor’s actions and properties and discounted the theory of its being sulphurous based on its lack of odor. In fact, it was carbon dioxide gas, which is heavier than air, emitted from fumeroles. Naples is near the sites of both Herculaneum and Pompeii, both of which were destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius, so the  area was known for volcanic activity. Incidentally, excavation of the ruins began in 1739. 

The Grotta del cane was described in greater detail in the January, 1753 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine. “The water of the lake near this grotto is wont to gurgle and boil up…” The author described masses of a glittering mineral called mundick by English miners (modern spelling: mundic) in the walls, which he says all chemists affirm is made up of vitriol and sulfur[3].
"File:The lake of Agnano. Etching, 16--. Wellcome L0038338.jpg" is licensed under CC BY 4.0
The grotto is right of center, with three men and a dog at the entrance.

Another half dozen scientific articles included “The path of the Moon, with cut”, “Of tillage with marle, &c”, and “Leech, how to use as a barometer”. Imagine The Atlantic Monthly, GQ Magazine, or Cosmopolitan running multiple scientific articles in addition to poetry, political reports, and art and entertainment features. No, I can’t, either. 

Next blog: Smallpox!

[1] Oh, and the American Revolution, of course.

[2] Women, not so much, with exceptions. This is a topic for a future blog.

[3] In fact, it is the mineral pyrite.