Smallpox

Along time ago a beautiful woman
wife of an English diplomat
assifned to Constantinople Turkey.

She got smallpox, which disfigured her beauty
but at least she was alive, as the death rate is pretty high
at upwards of 30% or more.  

Smallpox had ravaged the earth
ever since the times of the roman empire.
scars were even found
on Egyptian mummies, believed to be small pox,
3000 years ago.

When it came time for the once beautiful woman to have a baby,
the attending doctor in Constantinople, noticed her scars,
and mentioned that in his town, the villagers would scratch a sore
of a recovered person, who still had pus filled sores,
then would scratch it into a young child's arm,
to give them immunity.

Her 5 year old, Edward, received the treatment,
being quite traumatized over being scratched by
a  fingernail, full of pus.
When his mom returned to England,
she spread the word of this new technique.
It became practiced far and wide.

But sadly it was eventually realized
that perhaps ten percent of the children so scratched,
actually got smallpox.

His mom's procedure fell out of favour,
Edward, became obsessed with Smallpox,
choosing  a profession in the medical arts.

After completing his studies,
Edward was assigned to the English countryside.  
In treating the populace,
Edward heard anecdotal stories of how milkmaids never
caught smallpox.  Not a one.    
Edwartd soon made his way to a farm and observed
milkmaids which had pox like sores on their hands,
but only their hands.
Edward reasoned that they had got the cow version of smallpox,

Cowpox did not have the ability to strongly infect humans,
but did indeed, enliven their immune system to successfully
fight off human smallpox.

Edward excitedly rounded up  a child, the son of one of his servants,
and did  scratch the pus of a milkmaid, and then into the boy's arm.
 
Then in a few weeks, he exposed the child to the deadly smallpox.  Repeatedly.  The child remained protected.

Edward then went on to repeat the experiment on all the
available children of his servants, and indeed on his very own 11 month old son, reasoning that being infected with the relatively mild cowpox, would then create resistance to smallpox.

Edward published his experiments,
and soon the procedure, around 1798,
became wildly successful.

This is why the world has smallpox almost under compleat control.

So in perspective,
a disease far more destructive than Covid took a thousand years
before it was beat,  
Covid, in just several months,
even though word of a cure in one region
seems agonizingly slow to get the word out to
other hospitals