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Here is an interesting article about a 135 year-old Smallpox scab causing an infection scare at a Virginia museum. It would not have occurred to me that such an old scab could be infectious, but then again, I am among the minority of the population inoculated against Smallpox. In fact, I have received the Smallpox vaccine three times, when I was a child in 1973, in 1989 when I first went to Basic training, and again in 2003 prior to deploying to Iraq. The last two times I got inoculated twice because the medics did not believe me when I told them I had been immunized before and there are different procedures for initial and re-immunizations.
Saving scabs. That is pretty…nasty. But it is interesting at the same time that they knew how to deal with smallpox back then.
I believe the original vaccine for smallpox is a few hundred years old and was discovered when a doctor noticed that milkmaids who had had Cowpox did not get Smallpox. I was right, at least partly.
That was an interesting read from that site you linked to:
The first written account of variolation describes a Buddhist nun practicing around 1022 to 1063 AD. She would grind up scabs taken from a person infected with smallpox into a powder, and then blow it into the nostrils of a non-immune person. By the 1700's, this method of variolation was common practice in China, India, and Turkey. In the late 1700's European physicians used this and other methods of variolation, but reported “devastating” results in some cases. Overall, 2% to 3% of people who were variolated died of smallpox, but this practice decreased the total number of smallpox fatalities by 10-fold.
Also, the part about how this is where the word “vaccine” comes from.
