Veritas (Atto Melani) (110 page)

Subcutaneous inoculation spread throughout Europe two years later, between 1716 and 1718, when the wife of the English ambassador in Constantinpole, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, officially
imported it from Turkey into England. On her travels she promoted inoculation in all the European courts with great enthusiasm, even having her own children inoculated. In 1716 she passed through
Vienna, where, as her diary informs us, she met Joseph’s widow and daughters. In 1720 in England she persuaded the King to have some prisoners inoculated. From 1723 inoculation became
widespread.

However, in those same years, smallpox, rather than getting weaker, ceased to be a “benign illness” and became mortal in almost all cases. It was no longer considered an infant
disease. The symptoms were much more serious than those described in the preceding centuries and above all were unmistakeably hideous: there was no longer any likelihood of confusing the horrible
smallpox pustules with those of chickenpox or, even less likely, with the little red spots of measles.

Marco Cesare Nannini’s essay,
La storia del vaiolo
(Modena 1963), provides some terrifying statistics. In the twenty-five years following upon the introduction of inoculation, 10
per cent of the world’s population died. There were numerous cases of haemorrhagic smallpox. Inoculation soon proved to be an excellent instrument of colonial conquest: the Indians of America
were decimated in this fashion, from the Redskins to the Indios. E. Bertarelli (
Jenner e la scoperta della vaccinazione
, Milan 1932) reports that in Santo Domingo alone, for example, 60
per cent of the population died in the space of a few months. In Haiti, smallpox, imported in 1767, rapidly killed two-thirds of the inhabitants; in Greenland it exterminated three-quarters of the
population in 1733.

In Europe, between the introduction of subcutaneous inoculation and the end of the eighteenth century, sixty million people died of smallpox (H.J. Parish,
A History of Immunization
,
London 1965, p. 21). At the end of the eighteenth century very similar estimates were formulated (D. Faust,
Communication au congrès de Rastadt sur l’extirpation de la petite
vérole
, 1798,
Archives Nationaux de France
, F8 124). In 1716 smallpox caused 14,000 deaths in Paris, and another 20,000 in 1723; in 1756 mass deaths occurred in Russia, as they
had done in 1730 in England, where in little more than four decades 80,505 deaths were recorded from smallpox; in Naples, in 1768, in a few weeks, there were 6,000 deaths; in Rome, in 1762, another
6,000; in Modena, in 1778, following upon a single instance of subcutaneous inoculation, an epidemic was unleashed that decimated the city in the space of eight months; in Amsterdam, in 1784, there
were 2,000 deaths; in Germany in 1798, 42,379; in Berlin alone, in 1766, 1,077 deaths; in London, in 1763, 3,528. England did great business with inoculation: Daniel Sutton had founded a
flourishing inoculation business, with branches that spread to the remote western territories of New England and Jamaica during the second half of the century.

How many people died from smallpox before inoculation? A few examples from London: 38 deaths in 1666, 60 in 1684, 82 in 1636. In short, hardly any.

At the court of Vienna, before Joseph’s case, smallpox had struck only Ferdinand IV. But after Joseph the disease exploded, and by the end of the eighteenth century it had killed nine more
Habsburgs. There were countless cases of haemorrhagic smallpox in those years, and
all
ended with the death of the patient.

Here are two descriptions of the illness for the sake of comparison. The first is by Scipione Mercuri, the famous Roman doctor who lived from 1540 to 1615 (
La commare
, Venezia 1676,
libro terzo, cap. XXIV, p. 276,
Delle Varole e cura loro
), and therefore prior to the introduction of inoculation. It will be noted that Mercuri, too, considers smallpox and measles as
similar (he deals with them extensively also in
De morbis puerorum
, lib. I,
De variolis et de morbillis
, Venetiis, 1588).

The second description of smallpox is by Doctor Faust, taken from the essay already cited of 1798, and therefore at the height of the vaccinatory euphoria.

Here is Mercuri:

And here is Faust’s description in 1798:

There is an equally horrific verse description that Abbot Jean-Joseph Roman wrote in 1773 in his poem
L’inoculation
about a sufferer from smallpox:

The description of the haemorrhage found in Joseph I appears very similar to the “smallpox purpura” described by Dr Gerhard Buchwald, a German doctor almost ninety
years old now, in his book
Vaccination. A Business Based on Fear
, 2003 (original German title:
Impfen: Das Geschäft mit der Angst
, Munich 2000). Dr Buchwald is one of the
rare doctors still alive to have personally observed and studied smallpox cases. In 2004 we sent him the documentation concerning Joseph’s illness. We then had a long conversation on the
telephone. Based on his own experience Buchwald claims that damage to the blood vessels is only and exclusively found in cases of smallpox induced by viruses injected into the vessels. The same
conclusion can be read in his book (p. 50 of the German edition), which states that the haemorrhagic course of the disease is to be attributed to the recent injection of the virus and always ends
in death.

In short, for Buchwald there is no such thing as naturally occurring haemorrhagic smallpox; it is caused by the introduction of the practice of inoculation/vaccination.

There are numerous studies on smallpox that make the claim that subcutaneous inoculation had been known in China and India for millennia. The same propaganda was spread in the
eighteenth century to inspire confidence in the practice. It is false.

As far as China is concerned, the Jesuit father D’Entrecolles, a missionary in Peking, is often cited as a source. But he wrote in May 1726, no earlier than that, and does nothing but
quote a passage from a Chinese book which describes the practice of immunisation from smallpox, but by inhalation and not inoculation. There is no connection with inoculation, therefore; indeed,
the Jesuit specifies that according to Chinese doctors it would be lethal for smallpox to enter the body by means that were not natural (like the nose), but through an incision in the skin. The
famous treatise of the history of Chinese medicine by Chimin Wong and Wu Lien-Teh (
History of Chinese Medicine
, Shangai 1936) makes the same claim and adds that some medical historians
point to India as the place where inoculation began.

The famous Indian doctor, a professor at the University of Calcutta, Girindranath Mukhopadhyaya, in his
History of Indian Medicine
(Delhi 1922–29, vol. I, pp. 113–33),
examines all the claims about the practice of inoculation in India having its roots in the distant past. Mukhopadhyaya reaches the same conclusion as us: there is no evidence of this. There are
doctors – nearly all English – who have written studies in which they claim to have heard stories from ancient times that refer to this practice. One of them, a certain Doctor Gillman,
has even unearthed a Sanskrit treatise of medicine that mentions inoculation. Mukhopadhyaya had the text examined by two Sanskrit scholars, who recognised it as an “interpolation”: a
blatant forgery, in short. In the ancient Indian treatises of medicine by Caraka, Su
ś
ruta, V
ā
gbhata, M
ā
dhava, Vrnda
M
ā
dhava, Cakradatta, Bh
ā
va Mi
ś
ra and others, Mukhopadhyaya could not find the slightest allusion to the practice of smallpox inoculation.
Furthermore, in the hymns to the Goddess
Ś
ital
ā
, taken from the K
ā
ikhanda by Skanda Pur
ā
na, it is explicitly stated
that there is no remedy for smallpox except prayers to the goddess. And yet Mukhopadhyaya says emphatically, “no one has yet questioned the notion that inoculation was frequently practised in
India.”

Mukhopadhyaya suspects, as we do, a conspiracy to provide a pedigree first for inoculation and subsequently for vaccination, so that the masses would be induced to trust these practices and to
let them be carried out on themselves and on their children.

(In addition to forgeries, the history of smallpox contains numerous embarrassing silences. The inventor of vaccination – which was what inoculation subsequently developed into – the
famous English doctor, Edward Jenner, vaccinated his own ten-month-old son with material extracted from the pustules of a smallpox victim, and the child was left mentally handicapped and died at
the age of twenty-one. Later on, in 1798, Jenner vaccinated a child aged five, who died almost immediately, and an eight-month pregnant woman, who just a month later miscarried a baby covered in
pustules similar to smallpox. Despite these experiences, Jenner sent samples of the material used for these experiments to the ruling houses of Europe, which made widespread use of them on orphan
children to develop new diseases in order to be able to extract new samples of infected material. Every manual of medical history carefully avoids reporting these facts.)