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“The King of Terrors” Revisited: The Smallpox Vaccination Campaign and its Lessons for Future Biopreparedness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Cynthia P. Schneider  and
Michael D. McDonald
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Extract

“Smallpox was always present, filling the churchyard with corpses, tormenting with constant fear all whom it had not yet stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden objects of horror to the lover.” In 1848, British historian T.B. Macaulay first captured the picture of the devastation smallpox wreaked on its victims, but the “King of Terrors,” as it was dubbed by future president John Adams, had already decimated populations in the ancient world from Greece to Egypt to China. Smallpox had no respect for authority: the earliest identified victim, Pharaoh Ramses V (d.1157 B.C.) was but the first in a long line of monarchs and rulers who succumbed,. including the Hittite king Suppiluliumas I, Aztec Emperor Cuitlahuac, and Queen Mary II of England.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , Winter 2003 , pp. 580 - 589
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2003

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