Small Pox Research Paper

Words: 704
Pages: 3

Smallpox

Fever, lethargy, sore throat, and vomiting are the first symptoms but it's not until a couple days later a raised rash appears on the face and body, and sores form inside the mouth, throat, and nose. Smallpox was an infectious disease that is believed to have infected humans around the time of the earliest agricultural settlements some 12,000 years ago(history). This disease killed millions in medieval times like princes, paupers, monarchs as well as Ethiopian kings and Chinese emperors. This disease would not fall until someone finally came up with the first ever vaccination but, until then it would take millions of people's lives in the thousands of years it had nothing to stop it. The pus-filled lesions and scars that
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Queen Elizabeth I and Abraham Lincoln also contracted smallpox during their time in office, they forcefully lived to tell people about the horrible disease. Meanwhile, in Europe alone, an estimated 400,000 commoners were succumbing to smallpox annually(history). That was until 1776 an English physician named Edward Jenner came up with a vaccination for smallpox. Edward Jenner found that women who milked cows that had cowpox they would get that disease which is not as bad as smallpox ---even though they’re in the same family--- and never get the worse disease which is smallpox. So Edward then decided to take the cowpox bumps and scrape them on healthy people and then a couple days later he would take an infected person's bumps who had smallpox and scrape them on the people he had before scraped cowpox on and they seemed to be immune and never contracted the disease. This became the first real vaccination because instead of taking variolation which is far more dangerous and took the actual disease and gave it to the person they were trying too immune. Vaccination used the far less dangerous cow pox virus which immune people to the deadlier smallpox