Here’s a short history of smallpox vaccinations (plus a few notes about my Norwegian ancestors and some etymology of words thrown in) . . .
#1: The first vaccine in Europe was created to prevent smallpox. In the late 1700s an English doctor, Edward Jenner, noticed that dairymaids who survived cowpox (a relatively mild disease) didn’t get smallpox (a horrible disease that killed a lot of people). Jenner believed that if you deliberately infected people with cowpox, maybe they wouldn’t get smallpox. His theory was right. It worked.
#2: It’s called “vaccination” because the Latin word for cow is “vacca.” Cowpox is a disease you get from cows. I know that the French word for cow is “vache.” In Spanish, it’s “vaca.”
#3: Have you ever known a Norwegian-American named Odegaard? There are hundreds of farms all over Norway called that. In Norwegian, ødegård means “abandoned (or empty) farm.” Gård/gaard is related to the English words “garden” and “yard,” but in Norwegian, it means “farm.” Usually an empty farm was empty because everyone who lived there died in an epidemic. In the 1300s, it was the bubonic plague (the black death) that killed everyone at a farm. In the 1700s it was smallpox. Later, people might move to an Odegaard farm because “Hey, look, there’s an empty farm! Let’s live there. Maybe we won’t die!” I have at least one Odegaard ancestor. I also have some ancestors in the 1700s who had several brothers and sisters who died of “epedemi” within a few months of each other. I can only imagine how sad that was for the parents.
#4: In the early 1800s, Norwegian churches started keeping track of people who had been vaccinated against smallpox – and also people who had survived smallpox and were naturally immune. This was done by churches, not by the government. The churches back then wouldn’t allow you to get married if you couldn’t prove you were either vaccinated or naturally immune. In the later 1800s, if a Norwegian wanted to emigrate to America on a transatlantic ship, the ship captains wanted proof that he or she was vaccinated. They didn’t want the passengers on a crowded ship to get smallpox – which makes sense. Churches would give papers to emigrants saying, “Ole Johansen was baptized in the Lutheran church and he was confirmed in the Lutheran church. He’s a good church member. Also, he was vaccinated against smallpox.” It didn’t matter if you were moving twenty miles away to a new church parish or traveling across the sea to America. When you moved out of a parish, you got official papers from your preacher.
In modern times, the last known case of smallpox occurred in 1977. In 1980, The World Health Organization certified that smallpox had been eradicated from the planet. And that’s proof that vaccines work. They’re a good thing. In the future, nobody will get smallpox ever again because our ancestors did the right thing.