"inoculating" against smallpox in the old days

[The McDonald Family]

At 12:38 PM 2/3/1999 -0800, you wrote:
>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).

>From what I know about the mass epidemics that swept pre-Columbian Europe,
the highest (proportional) death oll in continental Europe came with the
Black Death, which killed roughly a third of the population. The population
of France, for instance, dropped from an estimated 22 million to 15 million
-- it wouldn't reach that level until the beginning of the 18th century.
Someone with a Germanic name who wrote for _Time_ wrote a book about various
apolcalyptic events, published in the 1980's Reagan era. (I'm sorry I can't
be more precise.) His sources -- including a church "census" seemed to
suggest that a third of the population died. Death tolls were higher in
cities, but some cities like Florence were able to avoid the worst of the
depopulation through strict hygiene measures, including walling up the ill
and their families within their homes.

As you noted, the death toll from the Black Death in Iceland and Norway
(among other peripheral populations) was proportionally higher. Iceland and
Norway were amongst the most isolated European communities ... the high
death toll (something like half of the population, if I'm not mistaken) was
a precursor to the Great Dying in the New World.