Received wisdom,jingoism and outright racism on the part of European academic institutions,colonial overlords,warring nations and unapologetic anti-Semites ensured Voltaire would be two centuries dead before humanity had even a semblance of control over these contagions.
The characters we meet as this unedifying struggle unfolds range from the delightful to the delinquent.
One delight is Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,whose “famous good looks had had her toasted as the ‘Beauty’ of The Kit Club” until losing her eyelashes and allure through a bout of the pox in 1715. Two years later she accompanied her husband Edward,British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire,and marvelled at the flawless skin of the naked women she shared time with in a Sofia hammam.
She discovered that it was a long-standing practice for older women to make small needle pricks in the arms and legs of young girls and rub them with the remains of pustules from a person with smallpox.
The spotless women of the bathhouse had her convinced,and she at once had her six-year-old son inoculated. But despite clear evidence of its efficacy and safety,it would be many decades before the procedure was widely accepted.
Of both cholera and plague perhaps the greatest and most courageous vaccination advocate and practitioner was Waldemar Haffkine (1860-1930) of Odessa;then in the Russian Empire,now a battleground in Ukraine. Refused a professorship in Russia due to his Jewish faith,he worked at the Pasteur Institute in Paris,where in 1892 (a year in which a third of the 200,000 pilgrims in Mecca for the Haj died of the disease) he famously and courageously injected himself with his own vaccine for cholera,with no ill effects beyond some local soreness.
In 1893 Haffkine took his vaccines (first cholera,then plague) to India,where despite the colonial medical establishment slashing his budgets and ridiculing his methods,he and his team protected hundreds of thousands of men and women,of every class and religion.
In 1902 his assistant dropped a plague needle in the village of Malkowal and continued using it,resulting in 19 fatalities. The British saw their chance and fired their “Russian Jew”.
While the war on smallpox was finally won,cholera and plague remain deadly threats in parts of the world. As Schama concludes with his post Covid-19 wrap-up,there is no post Covid-19. Contagious disease will always be with us. As humans multiply,stealing more territory (and flesh,and scales) from everything from monkeys to terrapins,viruses and bacteria will continue to jump the species barrier,mutate,and find us very tasty.
And the fearmongers and gullible will continue to blame demons,Jews,and 5G phone towers,while calling for the heads of the likes of Waldemar Haffkine and Anthony Fauci.
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