VICTORY OVER THE SCALY DEATH: FIRST SMALLPOX TRIAL VACCINATIONS IN BERLIN

Today in Berlin: 7 June, 1802

It was feared, it was deadly, and it never failed to return. By the late eighteenth century each year in Europe, smallpox - a highly infectious and potentially lethal disease AND the only completely eradicated infectious disease in human history - killed some 400,000 people.

Inoculation hero Edward Jenner and two of his colleagues chasing off 18th-century anti-vaxxers. By Isaac Cruikshank, 1808. Via Wellcome Library, London CC-BY 4.0.

It did not leave anyone out, rich or poor: including Austrian emperor, king of Spain, Russian tsar, Swedish queen and a French monarch. At best it left its victims scarred for life (like Stalin, who contracted smallpox at the age of 7), or blind and/or deaf: Beethoven’s deafness is contributed to his contact with the disease.

Johannes Kepler’s vision was quite limited after at the age of four he suffered bout of smallpox himself - later he would lose his wife and one of three children to the disease.

For at its worst, the disease killed its victims after many days of vile suffering.

That’s why after in 1801 nearly 1,700 people died of Blattern (German name for Smallpox) in Berlin, on 7 June 1802, successful trial smallpox inoculations (carried out mostly on Berlin orphans) began…