A History of the World (62 page)

Dessalines, in another echo of Napoleon, had himself crowned emperor in 1804, parading into town wearing an American crown, and transported in a British-made ceremonial carriage. The following year, perhaps egged on by the traditional enemies of France who wanted the colony finished off once and for all, Dessalines ordered a massacre of the whites left on what was now called ‘Haiti’. Two years later the British Parliament at last outlawed the Atlantic slave trade, and the Royal Navy began seizing slavers’ ships and freeing around 150,000 slaves. The plantation system was starting to collapse. That, plus the devastation of Haiti caused by years of war and the international isolation created by Dessalines’s massacre of whites, condemned the island to pariah status.

Its natural wealth had been greatly augmented by the colonists’ planting of sugar-cane, coffee, tobacco and the other goods that sucked it into the centre of an international trading system. But all this depended on systematized brutality. So far, people had managed to look the other way, but by the late eighteenth century Britain, at least,
was able to prosper mightily at home, with her steam-based industries, and had no need of the disgusting business. Yet had it not been for the slaves of Saint-Domingue taking the promises of the French Revolution at face value and showing the world that blacks could fight as well (or better) than their supposed masters, then the abolitionists might have had a harder time. The saddest thing of all, though, is that had Toussaint survived and built his little republic, a more substantial legacy might have been left behind; and Haiti today might have avoided its fate as a land of dictators and poverty.

Cowpox

In Boston in the 1720s, there lived a witch-hunting reverend called Cotton Mather, who did his best to find the hand of God in the appalling toll of children he and his wife had lost to the great scourge of the age, smallpox. ‘A dead child,’ he reflected, ‘is a sign no more surprising than a broken pitcher or a blasted flower.’ But Mather noticed a strange thing about his slave Onesimus, who had been born in far-off Libya. Onesimus, who did not catch the disease, had scratches on his arms which he had been given as a child in Africa. Like other African slaves, he had been inoculated according to tribal customs. Mather was intrigued. He began to wonder. He was not intrigued enough to spare his slave when he committed some minor misdemeanour and so had to be sold, but the germ – of an idea, for once – had been planted.
³⁶

On the other side of the Atlantic at the same time, a brilliant and well connected lady was on the same track. Mary Wortley Montagu had contracted a bad dose of smallpox in 1715, which destroyed her facial beauty and nearly killed her. When she went with her husband as ambassador to Turkey, she learned about the Ottoman habit of inoculation, or ‘variolation’ as it was called – a small nick in the skin, a little diseased matter inserted, and just a very mild dose resulted. The Turks used the trick to protect the beauty of women on their way to the harem. Lady Mary used it to protect her six-year-old son. Back in England a couple of years later, she did the same to her daughter and then persuaded her friend Princess Caroline to try it on the royal children.

In England as in America, a great argument then erupted. Smallpox
was a hideous and deadly disease. It had been known in ancient China, India and Africa and may have reached Greece and Rome in classical times. It certainly affected the Crusaders, who brought it home to Europe in the 1100s, where it became endemic. It produced rashes and then horrible seeping pustules across the face and body, dreadful cramps, blindness and often death. Survivors were generally scarred, often mutilated and blinded. Children were especially affected, and smallpox spread most effectively in the crowded conditions of European villages and towns. It has been estimated that by the eighteenth century one in ten of the deaths in England was from smallpox. In Glasgow between 1783 and 1802 it accounted for a third of child deaths. The situation was at least as bad in Russia, and across the century in Europe alone it may well have accounted for sixty million deaths.
³⁷

When we see recreations of the villages of Jane Austen’s England, or Enlightenment Edinburgh, or the American towns of the Revolutionary era, the film-makers will generally have left out one thing that would have stood out a mile – the crowds of pustule- and scar-covered people, their eyes squeezed shut by the mutilations of smallpox, wretched beyond description. One study concluded that ‘in terms of sheer numbers of people killed, blinded, crippled, pitted and scarred by smallpox over two thousand years of written and oral history, this disease was probably the worst pestilence ever to afflict mankind’.
³⁸

Yet people had known from ancient times that giving someone a small dose of smallpox could bring on a mild attack, which would stop them getting the full-blown disease later. Ancient Chinese doctors had gathered the scabs of smallpox sufferers, dried them, ground them up, and then blown them up the noses of patients, using special bone tubes. They also deliberately placed the pus in children’s clothing. In India and parts of Africa, people had it pushed into their veins with thorns, or they swallowed it, or smeared it into open wounds. This was the tradition that Rev Mather came across amongst Boston slaves and that Lady Mary had met with in the wooden houses of Constantinople. It was no secret.

But it was not really an answer, either. European doctors tended to shun the practice, and not for ridiculous reasons. A person infected with a small dose could still go on to develop a full attack, and die or find themselves maimed. A death rate of around 3–5 per cent was
expected, which made ‘variolation’ a real risk. Others were scarred or blinded. In London one of Lady Mary’s distinguished friends, the Earl of Sutherland, lost his son after inoculating him. In crowded conditions, introducing ‘variolation’ could actually spread the disease faster than it would naturally do. Finally, the dirty knives used by European apothecaries often spread other infections. English doctors, eagerly followed by cartoonists, had mocked Lady Mary and even suggested that inoculation was part of a foreign plot to kill off English babies.

So great was the smallpox scourge, however, that variolation slowly became more popular. As practised in England, it was a horrible experience. The boy or girl to be inoculated would be starved for several weeks so as to weaken the constitution, then bled so as to thin the blood, while being kept on a sparse vegetable diet. Then the cut would be made and smallpox inserted by tying bandages with dried scabs around the wound. To keep the disease from spreading, the child would then be tied down and kept in a ‘pest-house’ or barn with other sufferers, for ten days until the new scabs fell off. The conditions were foul and the experience scarred many people mentally as well as physically. One eight-year-old child who went through the ordeal in smallpox-ravaged Gloucestershire later complained that he had been reduced to a skeleton and never slept well afterwards. His name was Edward Jenner.

Jenner had lost most of his family early on and was brought up by a kindly and much older brother, a moderately well-to-do vicar. From an early age he was fascinated by botany and soon became determined to become a doctor, a job that then meant apprenticeship rather than university. In London he became a favourite of the greatest surgeon of the age, John Hunter, and was offered the chance to go on Captain Cook’s second voyage to Australia. He preferred, however, to return to Gloucestershire for the quieter pleasures of country doctoring. There he regularly came across the ravages of smallpox. In between practising medicine, growing cucumbers, experimenting with balloons and caring for an ill wife, he kept his ears open; and found himself pondering on a local folk-tale.

Apparently, milkmaids sometimes caught a bovine version of smallpox, called cowpox. Once they had been infected with this much milder disease, it was said, they were immune for life from the great scourge. It has even been suggested that the long tradition of songs
and poems describing the creamy beauty of milkmaids started because they had unpoxed complexions. At least one farmer, Benjamin Jesty, had been sure enough of the truth of the story to infect his wife with cowpox pus, in 1756. All sorts of strange things happened in the countryside.

But it was forty years later that the now middle-aged doctor did his famous experiment. Hearing that a farmer’s daughter, a milkmaid called Sarah Nelmes, had contracted cowpox in the village of Berkeley in Gloucestershire, on 14 May 1796 Jenner persuaded her to let him take some matter from her sores, and keep it. He then cut the arm of a boy called James Phipps, the son of a local labourer, and infected him. Young Phipps duly went down with the milder disease. Once he had recovered, on 1 July Jenner cut him again and tried to infect him with the smallpox material. (The ethics of using animals for medical experiment are hotly debated today; in eighteenth-century England, using a working-class boy seems to have caused little comment.) James failed to catch the disease. Jenner, who by then had been a doctor for twenty-four years, was certain enough of the result not to bother with many more tests, and quickly wrote up his idea in a pamphlet. It was an almost instant bestseller.

The story of how, and why, the news spread so fast is almost as interesting as the discovery itself. First, Jenner was a member of the local scientific debating club, and he presented his breakthrough as proven science, not simply as a country remedy. Though much of his argument was wrong, it took hold because there was a large and open-minded audience ready and waiting for it. Second, though a mere country doctor, he was well connected. Thanks to the fashionable spa town of Cheltenham – one of the resorts that grew up when the French wars made it impossible for wealthy Britons to travel abroad – he was in touch with influential aristocrats and writers, who spread the word.

Soon the cowpox treatment became all the rage in Britain, then quickly travelled abroad. In 1799 Princess Louisa of Prussia wrote to Jenner asking for ‘vaccine’ matter (the word comes from the Latin for ‘cow’), and in the same year this new medical star was presented to George III. Where royalty and aristocracy led, the middle classes followed. The next year, the host and hostess of a dinner party that Jane Austen was attending insisted on reading out Jenner’s pamphlet to the
assembled company. By 1801 the Royal Navy was inoculating its sailors, while at his country home, Monticello in Virginia, the US President Thomas Jefferson inoculated thirty people himself. That year the empress of Russia named the first child vaccinated in her country, ‘Vaccinof’, and it was estimated that a hundred thousand people in Europe were treated. The great discovery even leapt across the barriers thrown up by the interminable European war: in 1804 Napoleon had a medal cast to honour Jenner, then had his armies inoculated. In fact, Napoleon so revered Jenner that when the country doctor wrote to him on the subject, the French emperor agreed to free some British prisoners of war. One of Jenner’s greatest supporters in Paris was our famous do-gooder Dr Guillotin.

But the discovery was attacked, too. Ignorant cartoonists mocked the notion of infecting people with stuff from cows. Doctors warned that nothing good would come of it. More seriously, another famous intellectual of the age, Thomas Malthus, included a blast against Jenner in the second, 1806, edition of his famous book warning against overpopulation. For Malthus, the death-toll caused by smallpox was a good thing, keeping the population numbers down naturally. If the vaccine worked, then other diseases would simply pop up to take the place of smallpox and make the necessary cull. ‘Nature will not, nor cannot be, defeated in her purposes,’ wrote Malthus. ‘The necessary mortality must come, in some form or another.’

In fact, the vaccination system would make smallpox the first great scourge to be eradicated. Arguments delayed the necessary legislation in many countries, including Britain, till later in the nineteenth century. Smallpox continued to kill, blind and maim people across the world well into the twentieth. But, thanks to Jenner’s discovery, the United Nations was able to announce in 1980 that the disease had been completely eradicated. The country doctor, using the new belief in experimentation and the power of publication, had done infinitely more for the happiness of humanity than any of the political revolutionaries of his age so loudly declaring the rights of man.

1800–1918: The Industrial Revolution Upends Life around the Planet – and Then Attacks Itself

The Industrial Revolution

Between the mid-1700s and the end of the 1900s, the world would change more than at any time since the invention of farming. The term ‘industrial revolution’ technically makes no sense, since ‘revolution’ implies a return to something previous, while this was all new. But it has stuck. This mega-change, based on machines that used the earth’s stored energy (in coal and oil) to produce everything from cheap clothes to tinned food – and, not least, to build other machines – reshaped mankind’s relationship with nature. It allowed people to travel far more quickly across the sea, by steamship, and across the land, by train. It allowed them to light their homes and workplaces cheaply and effectively, greatly extending their useful hours, particularly in northern latitudes. It brought well made clothes, household goods and entertainments to millions of people in Europe and America who could never before have dreamt of enjoying such things.

But it came at a price so high that many thinkers hated this revolution, and questioned whether it was worth while. For it forced millions into repetitive, grindingly hard indoor jobs and into crammed, insanitary urban housing. Its environmental effects, in densely populated towns or valleys, could be terrible. Victorian Britons died in huge numbers from lung diseases caused by air pollution – almost a quarter of deaths were caused by bad air.
¹
In 1866, government inspectors found one river, the Calder, so polluted that its water made effective ink, while the Bradford Canal, teeming with the chemical by-products of industry, was regularly set on fire by local boys, the flames rising six feet along it.
²