"When many cures are offered for a disease, it means the disease is not curable" -Anton Chekhov
''Once you tell people there's a cure for something, the more likely they are to pressure doctors to prescribe it.'' -Robert Ehrlich, drug advertising executive.
"Opinions are like sphincters, everyone has one." - Chris Rangel
History of Smallpox and Smallpox Vaccination: An online exhibit from UCLA on the history of smallpox and smallpox vaccine (warning:gruesome pictures), and the history of vaccination in the US from the Harvard Medical School Rarebooks and Special Collections (not so gruesome pictures). I think we are entirely too complaisant about this disease. It’s been too many years since it has ripped through the world for there to be any sort of collective memory of it. But, reading about it in the words of the people who lived with it, you can’t help but realize how horrible it must have been. These were people, after all, who lived before the age of antibiotics and antiseptics, and daily faced the threat of death from infections that we treat as minor annoyances. The fact that smallpox stood out as the “devouring monster” from all the others says a lot about its seriousness. Then, too, when was the last time a medical advance was celebrated so publicly and so enthusiastically as the discovery of vaccination was? Jenner seems to have been treated as a hero, with medals being struck in his honor and his hair being saved and passed around. It must have been worse than we can ever imagine to have been so feared and its conquest so celebrated. posted by Sydney on
5/21/2002 07:58:00 AM
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