IUBio

Jenner, cowpox, smallpox, and the first vaccine

Ana Ana
Thu Sep 14 13:36:49 EST 1995


Paul:

Thank you for your reply to my post.  Don’t worry, I haven’t  forgotten variolation  preceded vaccination 
as a procedure to try to prevent smallpox.  I have also found  that it may have originated in China, and 
spread to the west.  Other authors say that it may have developed independently in India. Definitely, 
China, India, Persia and parts of Africa were the places where  variolation began during the first 
centuries of this millennium.  
I found interesting your comment:..”dried crusts of smallpox lesions being used, perhaps as an early 
attempt at attenuation or inactivation of the virus”.  I haven’t thought of it that way. I imagined they 
used the crusts because they could be stored without causing mayor visible changes on them and 
would be always available when needed, as opposed to the liquid from the pustule that would be 
harder then to preserve as such. It would be very interesting to know if anybody then ever thought of 
the smallpox crusts as a debilitated form of what ever caused the disease. I wish that person had 
written that idea down as a permanent record somewhere!
Variolation was done via different routes of administration of the “smallpox matter”:  In China, the dried 
crusts were inhaled. The Persians were reported to have swallowed the powder of dried pocks. In 
India, the powder of dried pocks was given by a cutaneous route. In Greece, Turkey, Arabia, and 
North Africa variolation was done by removing the thick liquid from a smallpox pustule and rubbing it 
into a small scratch on the arm made with a needle. There are no records to compare which route of 
administration would have been the best of the three.
Vaccination replaced variolation as a procedure to protect against smallpox because it was safer for 
the recipient.

Reference:

1. Behbehani, A.M. (1988) "The Smallpox Story. In Words and Pictures" The University of Kansas 
Medical Center, USA.
********************************
Ana Maria Soler-Rodriguez
arodri03 at interserv.com
********************************



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