"inoculating" against smallpox in the old days

[Mike Cleven]

At 10:44 AM 2/3/99 +0100, Henry Kammler wrote:
>> >
>> >How many of realize that smallpox was as bad or far worse for American
>> >natives than the black plague ever was for Europeans?
>>
>> Well, that's a fairly subjective statement.  In some parts of Europe, the
>> mortality WAS over 90%, sometimes over 95%, and the plague hit in
>> successive waves, with complete social chaos and cultural breakdown in its
>> wake.  50% is usually cited by demographers about the Black Death, but no
>> one really knows, there being no accurate record-keeping in those days.
>
>Do you have sources for that? "Our" collective hitorical consciousness in ye
>goode olde Germany always has pestilence as the most horrible plague in the
>first place, mortality rates would reach 50% or more in the crowded
cities, not
>so in the rural areas, though, where the majority of the people lived.
Smallpox
>also demanded a high toll but was not too rare and thus left its survivors
>immunized. The deadliest mixture was civil war coupled with pestilence,
pox and
>influenza like in 1618-1648.

My refs for that are (from memory) Colin McEvedy's "Atlas of World
Population History", his "Penguin Atlas of Mediaeval History", Barbara
Tuchman's tome on the Hundred Years' War ("Mirror" whatever), and the
course content from a "Byzantium and the Barbarian West" mediaeval history
course I took at SFU years ago.  I just checked my McEvedy and he says
between a quarter and a third of the population died in 1347-1353, so it
must not be from him that I got that figure; repeated waves of plague and
its associated social catastrophes (war, famine) kept the European
population struggling to rebuild, such that McEvedy says by 1400 the
population was 25% below its mediaeval peak (around 60 million).  Either
I'm thinking of specific countries, then - maybe Iceland and Norway and
others where mortality was much higher for various reasons - or it's in one
of the other sources which I don't have handy.  I think in some countries
(maybe not Germany) the mortality rate was also higher in the countryside
because of the close living quarters with livestock in those areas, and the
very high population densities on the European countryside at the time
(cities could shut out the plague, peasants couldn't).

>
>> The deadliest of the plagues to hit the Northwest wasn't smallpox.  It was
>> "the mortality", the unknown disease that was introduced by an irate Boston
>> trader against the peoples of the Lower Columbia and the Lower Fraser in
>> the early 1820s.  The fatality rate there is also unknown, but appears to
>> have been over 95%.  Apparently it was a hemorrhagic fever of some kind
>> (like Ebola or the deadliest super-influenzas), and was somehow brought in
>> from the tropics.......
>
>Evidence points towards measles as being the disease called "mortality"
>(1824/25), mortality was probably 10-20%. Boyd gives a good overview in the
>Handbook of NAI, vol.7, Northwest. Smallpox came in waves of one generation
>apart (1770, 1801, 1836/38) with an initial mortality of over 30%, and less
>than 20% in the subsequent waves (due to immunity). Smallpox was probably the
>biggest contributor to population loss over most of the time because of its
>frequent reocurrence. The hot river valleys of Oregon and Washington may
be an
>exception:

The "mortality" was mentioned in the mainstream press here a while back in
an article on tropical fevers, and apparently as far as epidemiological
history goes, the jury is still out.  The article in question mentioned the
measles possibility, but suggested that it would have had to have been a
much stronger form of measles in order to be so virulent (IIRC because
ordinary measles had already made its rounds).