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Historic Amherst

The Beginning of “Vaccine”

And the Amherst Physician Who Helped

BY KATRINA HOLMAN

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      Vaccine – that’s the word of the day, the week, the month, the year. This word and the related term, vaccination, were invented from the Latin word for cow (if your Latin is lacking, think Spanish), namely vacca. These novel words originated from the experimental discovery in 1796 by one Edward Jenner (1749-1823), a physician in England, that lymph from cows infected with the kine-pox virus could be used in humans to provide immunity against small-pox, the pandemic of its time – a scourge that lasted centuries. The story goes that dairy maids in England were known for their unblemished faces at a time when pock scars were common – the marks of small-pox on survivors. Key was figuring out that the girls who milked cows thus came in contact with kine-pox blisters on the teats. In his 1798 publication, Jenner named the disease variola vaccinae, Latin for small-pox of the cow. The derivative words “vaccine” and “vaccination” quickly made it across the Atlantic but the “vaccine disease” was more commonly called “cow-pox” in America.

      Statistics vary, but in 1792, shortly BEFORE Jenner’s discovery, a doctor in Edinburgh stated: “The small-pox, in the natural way, usually carries off 8 out of 100. By inoculation, one dies nearly out of 300. It is observed that more girls than boys die of the small-pox in the natural way.”

Earlier Small-Pox Inoculation

      Let’s back up to earlier in the 18th century for some background. As early as 1720 in Colonial America, a decade and a half before anyone settled in our Amherst, medical practitioners were inoculating people against and with small-pox using unweakened live pathogens. The idea was to avoid a deadly infection by causing a controlled infection. It did work sometimes (most times?), but significant number of people died as a direct result. A Boston newspaper, reporting in 1721 the deaths of people who died from small-pox infection received via inoculation, mentioned “Anti-Inoculators” who needed convincing of the benefit and/or safety of the practice. For the remaining decades of the 18th century, American newspapers regularly carried items about inoculation, including about conscientious objectors, about do-it-yourselfers like the man “without any skill in physick or surgery [who in 1750] ventured to inoculate five of my own family, which had a very happy effect” and blamed some deaths on practitioners who lodged the inoculated in “a lazarette for distemper” [distemper being another word for small-pox illness] (published in New York), and about a detailed treatment regimen of 1760 (published in Pennsylvania Gazette) with multiple “medicines” and even blood-letting for before and after inoculation to lessen the inherent danger and another “new method” that included mercury and antimony (published in Boston Evening Post of Jan. 1761 and N.H. Gazette of Portsmouth in Feb 1761) – unlikely to assuage distrust or fear, imho. “Poor Richard’s Almanack for the Year 1761” contained “besides the usual calculations, a very interesting account of Inoculation, wherein the most successful methods for preparing the body not only before, but also between the inoculation and eruption.”

Quarantining Small-Pox

      Meanwhile, town officials faced with outbreaks of this scourge, even for only two cases or just one family, quickly enforced social isolation. In March 1761, the Selectmen of Hartford, Conn. required visitors to the town to provide a certificate of inoculation by their

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doctor else they would be “confined in a separate house at their own expense until sufficiently cleansed.” (Does that give you, too, chills?) If the infected house were out-of-the-way enough, officials might simply hang a red flag to warn away visitors (as in Charlestown, Mass., in June 1764) but often a building in town off-the-beaten-track was designated as a pest-house and those sick with small-pox were required to move there.

Inoculation Hospitals

      In New England in the latter half of the 18th century, some Towns and private physicians set up special inoculation hospitals, and Towns took to notifying the public of their infection status and inoculation rates. Some examples of such hospitals:

      Someone anonymously advertised in 1752 (in Boston Weekly News-Letter): “To be Lett, several convenient rooms in a commodious house in Boston with necessary bedding and furniture, suitable for such of the inhabitants of this town, who are inclined to return from the country to receive the small-pox by inoculation.” A doctor in Boston in 1764 advertised his success with inoculation of upwards of 50 patients who recovered well; and promoted his “hospital” capable of containing 50 persons recovering from the “distemper” resulting from inoculation with small-pox, where “children will have particular care [and] the whole Charge will be Reasonable.”

      In Boston in 1764, “Numbers of persons are daily coming into Town, as also to the Hospitals at Point Shirley and Castle William to receive the Small Pox by inoculation:  besides those who come from the neighboring towns, there are several from the Province of New Hampshire, the Colonies of Connecticut, and Rhode Island. It is judged that between 3 and 4000 Persons have gone safely through that Distemper, in the time since Liberty was granted for Inoculation, which is five weeks; and it is observable there has been little or no infection from those who have had the disease; we can’t learn that there have been 20 persons taken down in the Natural Way in the above time, notwithstanding that several hundreds of children in this town are exposed thereto, an account of some Scruples the Parents or Guardians of them have as to the Lawfulness of the practice.” (N.H. Gazette, 19 April 1764.)             Portsmouth in July 1778 reported (N.H. Gazette) : “the Small-Pox in this place is wholly at an end, not a person having the Disorder either in Town or Hospitals, in the natural Way or by Inoculation.  The Success of Inoculation in this place and neighbouring towns is almost incredible, upwards of 1100 persons of all ages and constitutions have been inoculated by the

physicians of this town within the short space of three months, and only two unfavourable circumstances [now there’s a euphemism for death!] have happened...” At Cardigan, Grafton county, N.H., promoting its “fine healthy air equal to any in Newengland,” in 1790 a man “licensed according to law” advertised “Inoculation for the Small-pox” in “a good convenient building” for which payment could be made in “English and Westindia goods, and country produce”; and “bedding will be gladly received.” (Concord Herald, N.H., 24 Feb. 1790.) In 1792: “The small-pox is daily breaking out in some part or other of this state” [including Newcastle, N.H. where] inhabitants voted to open a hospital for small-pox inoculation, “for which they obtained leave of the court” (N.H. Spy, Portsmouth, 1 Dec 1792). Charlestown, N.H., opened such a hospital in June 1794 and Hampstead in Sep. 1795. By 1797, Portsmouth was utilizing two islands, one called unambiguously Pest Island for a pest-house, and Shapley’s Island for an inoculation hospital consisting of multiple “commodious apartments in different buildings” where a whole “class” of patients would undergo treatment at the same time, recovery taking about two to three weeks (reported in Oracle of the Day).

      In Boston, an outbreak in 1792, which turned out to be “merely” in two houses, caused such concern that a special town meeting by petition “to take the sense of the town with regard to general inoculation” drew so large a crowd that it had to move from Faneuil Hall to Old South Meetinghouse – yet after heated debate a large majority simply voted in favor of the motion “That the Selectmen continue their exertions to prevent the spreading of the disorder by removing such persons as are or may be infected, to such places as they may think proper to provide.”

Despite the new, safer vaccine in the 19th century, there continued to be outbreaks and pest-houses arranged by the Towns in response, such as in Lexington, Mass., in Jan. 1824 and in Concord, N.H. in 1835. In 1837, the editor of the Nashua Telegraph, reporting on two cases of small-pox in Nashua, protested “the practice of dragging an individual [who is supposed to be infected] from his family and sending him to a pest house.” The same item in the Farmers’ Cabinet (13 Nov. 1837), in what appears to be a concurring editorial by the Amherst editor, continues: “The truth is vaccination has been so generally resorted to, that the small-pox has become nearly as harmless and non contagious as a common fever, and to drag an individual from his family and render his chance of recovery ten times less, by confining him in some dreary, dilapidated and comfortless old building, fit only for the abode of owls and bats, is a species of refined cruelty which admits of no excuse. Every one may protect himself against small-pox by resorting to vaccination, and if he refuses to purchase exemption at so trifling an inconvenience to himself, he has no right to demand that his neighbor shall be sacrificed for his safety. The law on this subject ought to be modified or repealed.” Small-pox remained a scary problem, but the use of pest-houses seems to have ended about this time. For example, in 1846, when health officials of Manchester, N.H., were confronted with a household of 8 infected persons, they “advised resort to vaccination, and [did] not deem it necessary to institute a pest house there.”  

APRIL 2021

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