301 From Inoculation to Vaccination, Part 1

Ben Franklin's World

Liz Covart

History, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 27 April 2021

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Smallpox was the most feared disease in North America and in many parts of the world before its eradication in 1980. So how did early Americans live with smallpox and work to prevent it? How did they help eradicate this terrible disease? Over the next two episodes, we’ll explore smallpox in North America. We’ll investigate how smallpox came to North America, how North Americans worked to contain, control, and prevent outbreaks of the disease, and how the story of smallpox is also the story of immunization. In this episode, we join experts Dr. René Najera, Farren Yero, Ben Mutschler, and Andrew Wehrman for a journey through the history of smallpox and the world’s first immunization procedure: inoculation. Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/301 Complementary Episodes 🎧 Episode 005: Jeanne Abrams, Revolutionary Medicine 🎧 Episode 116: Erica Charters, Disease & the Seven Years’ War 🎧 Episode 174: Thomas Apel, Yellow Fever in the Early American Republic 🎧 Episode 263 Sari Altschuler, The Medical Imagination 🎧 Episode 273: Victoria Johnson, David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Early Republic 🎧 Episode 276: Stephen Fried, Benjamin Rush REQUEST A TOPIC 📨 Topic Request Form 📫 liz@benfranklinsworld.com WHEN YOU'RE READY 🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter 👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener Community LISTEN 🎧 🍎 Apple Podcasts 💚 Spotify 🎶 Amazon Music 🛜 Pandora CONNECT 🦋 Liz on Bluesky 👩‍💻 Liz on LinkedIn 🛜 Liz’s Website SAY THANKS 💜 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts 💚 Leave a rating on Spotify Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Ben Franklin's world is a production of the Yoma-Hundro Institute.
0:07.0	We need to imagine people going about their everyday lives and having all sorts of routines
0:12.0	that are going to be suddenly upset, including routines around helping people when they're sick,
0:17.0	where, narrowly, when somebody's sick, people come, neighbors help out,
0:21.0	they help in the fields they watch through the night.
0:24.0	Given the amount of time that one needs to be sequestered,
0:28.0	that's quite considerable sort of loss that's faced.
0:31.0	And so there's a growth of poverty in this time,
0:34.0	and the select men and others feel all sorts of concerns the people have.
0:39.0	They say they can't pay their taxes, for example.
0:42.0	So all these sorts of things ask for a kind of new imagination to turn on the spur of the moment.
0:47.0	There's also a good deal that happens in terms of the just stoppage of daily life
0:53.0	and the kinds of things that help people make their way through this world.
0:58.0	The growth of poverty, the disruption and stoppage of everyday lives and routines.
1:03.0	This sounds like a scene right from our 2021 lives,
1:06.0	as we continue to live through the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
1:10.0	Only this scene of disruption that historian Ben Muchler has just painted for us,
1:15.0	is not from 2021, it's from 1721.
1:20.0	The year the people of Boston suffered through a devastating smallpox epidemic.
1:25.0	If you see smallpox once, you will probably never forget it.
1:29.0	Smallpox begins with a flu-like illness.
1:32.0	You think it's just any other flu,
	...

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