<
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/science-technology-vaccine-invention-history/672227/>
"If you were, for whatever macabre reason, seeking the most catastrophic moment
in the history of humankind, you might well settle on this: About 10,000 years
ago, as people first began to domesticate animals and farm the land in
Mesopotamia, India, and northern Africa, a peculiar virus leaped across the
species barrier. Little is known about its early years. But the virus spread
and, whether sooner or later, became virulent. It ransacked internal organs
before traveling through the blood to the skin, where it erupted in pus-filled
lesions. Many of those who survived it were left marked, disfigured, even
blind.
As civilizations bloomed across the planet, the virus stalked them like a
curse. Some speculate that it swept through ancient Egypt, where its scars
appear to mar the mummified body of Pharaoh Ramses V. By the fourth century
A.D., it had gained a foothold in China. Christian soldiers spread it through
Europe during the 11th- and 12th-century Crusades. In the early 1500s, Spanish
and Portuguese conquistadors conveyed it west across the Atlantic, where it
ravaged native communities and contributed to the downfall of the Aztec, Mayan,
and Inca empires.
By the end of the 1500s, the disease caused by the virus had become one of the
most feared in the world. About a third of those who contracted it were dead
within weeks. The Chinese called it
tianhua, or “heaven’s flowers.”
Throughout Europe, it was known as
variola, meaning “spotted.” In England,
where doctors used the term
pox to describe pestilent bumps on the skin,
syphilis had already claimed the name “the great pox.” And so this disease took
on a diminutive moniker that belied the scale of its wretchedness:
smallpox."
Via David Bray.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
