Smallpox: The Plague Humanity Defeated

thank you to dollar shave club for sponsoring this video go to dollarshaveclub.com forward slash biographics to get your starter set for just five dollars after that product ship at regular prices it's one of the worst diseases in history smallpox spent millennia as the scourge of mankind inflicting death wherever it reared its ugly head in the 20th century alone it killed some 300 million people almost as many as the spanish flu but while survivors of the flu returned to normal survivors of smallpox were left damaged for life blindness infertility and hideous disfigurement were frequent outcomes ones that affected people from all segments of society princes pharaohs emperors queens artists warriors workers all found themselves struck down by the disease that felled empires and annihilated cities until one day it stopped in the mid-20th century a push by the world health organization saw smallpox become the first disease to ever be completely eradicated the last natural case was recorded in 1977. after thousands of years of suffering humanity was finally free but what was this virus we drove to extinction where did it come from and how did it affect the story of humanity well today we're diving into the life of one of history's great plagues and how it created our modern world [Music] of all the nasty viruses that have afflicted mankind few have been as nasty as smallpox once inhaled into your system it stays hidden for around 12 days almost like an army laying the perfect ambush in that time your life carries on as normal you go to work hang out with friends never knowing that your death warrant has already been signed then on day 13 it happens the first symptoms are headaches back pain chills vomiting at first you pray that you're mistaken that it's just a bad dose of the flu but as the 17th day approaches you discover the truth pustules start to appear inside your throat then spread out like an army marching across your skin every inch of you this army touches breaks out in hard pus-filled lumps with an indentation in the middle after that you're on a roller coaster of pain depending on which version of the virus you've caught various minor or variola major your chances of death could be anyway from a mere 3 percent to a staggering 30 but surviving might be even worse once smallpox has finished ravaging your system the pustules on your face feet and hands scab over and fall off leaving behind hideous pitted scars that will stay with you for the rest of your life even once you recover you may be left blind and infertile sounds pretty awful right almost as if a writer with a particularly twisted imagination sat down and tried to dream up the nastiest science fiction disease they could think of but smallpox isn't science fiction it existed during the lifetime of anyone older than their mid-forties and prior to that it had been around for centuries the exact origins of smallpox are still a mystery some have suggested it may date back to as far as 10000 bc when the neolithic revolution brought us into sustained contact with livestock on the other hand research in 2016 concluded that it may have appeared as late as the 16th century a.d for this video though we're just going to go with the majority opinion which says all we know is that smallpox had first appeared by 1570 bc that's because 1570 bc is the start date of egypt's new kingdom and a handful of mummies from the era still show telltale signs of infection this includes ramesses v who had a swath of long dead pustules dried out on his cheeks likely the first known instances of smallpox killing a leader not that most victims were anybody you'd have heard about although smallpox afflicted adults the majority of those it killed were children and the majority of those were kids who lived in cramped quarters where the virus could spread and spread it did although smallpox was relatively non-contagious compared to stuff like measles once it got hold it really got old there's a 14th century hittite tablet describing what may be the disease sweeping their lands the pandemic raged for 20 years and carried off two rulers before finally fading but if that sounds bad just know there is far worse to come across the history of eurasia there would be barely a single empire that didn't come into contact with smallpox at some point or another in some cases this brief brush would be enough to bring their civilization crashing down [Music] if you ever find yourself in the possession of a time machine be sure to follow the following advice whatever you do do not set the controls for 430 bc athens that's because athens in 430 bc was in the grip of a pandemic that would make covert 19 look like an outbreak of rainbows and puppies during the second year of the peloponnesian war a disease arrived in the port of piraeus known as the plague of athens it killed around a third of the population in horrifying fashion the historian thucydides who himself contracted the virus described it thus violent heats in the head redness and inflammation of the eyes throat and tongue quickly suffused with blood breath became unnatural and fetid sneezing and hoarseness violent cough vomiting wretching violent convulsions the body externally not so hot to the touch nor yet pale a livid color inkling to red breaking out in pustules and ulcers pustules and ulcers probably sounding familiar we don't actually know what caused the plague of athens but smallpox is a major contender other possible diseases include measles and the bubonic play smallpox becomes an even more likely contender when you hear that some survivors were left blind whatever it was the plague left athens badly weakened it carried off the great leader pericles and contributed to athens ultimately losing the peloponnesian war but while the jury is out on whether smallpox was the culprit the same can't be said of one of the ancient world's other great plagues the antonine plague landed nearly six centuries after the plague of athens arriving in ancient rome around 165 a.d in all likelihood it was brought from china traveling along the silk road carried into europe by the very traders trying to escape it where the plague of athens would kill tens of thousands though the antonine plague would kill millions two weeks after contact with an infected person the victims would come down with fevers diarrhoea vomiting and coughing shortly after that their skin erupted in pustules which would soon form scabs that covered nearly the entire skin and if you think that sounds gross wait till you hear this the worst affected would even cough up scabs that had been formed inside their bodies not nice at the plague's height over 2000 people were dying each day in the eternal city a number that eventually included emperor marcus aurelius the final death toll was a staggering 3.5 to 7 million it may have contributed to the military's inability to defend rome's german border naturally people had all sorts of wacky theories about its cause some said a roman general opened a forbidden door while sacking seleucia releasing the plague others that a soldier opened a casket in babylon's temple and the gods sent him the plague as a punishment it's only with hindsight that we can call the antonine plague what it most likely was smallpox yet while smallpox devastated eurasia's early empires it also gave them a strange kind of gift with each new pandemic eurasian resistance to the pox grew while it might not sound so great it would soon become a very valuable asset some 1 400 years after the antonine plague a group of europeans would arrive on a continent that had never seen smallpox before it would be thanks to this tiny virus that they soon became the continent's masters the next few centuries were an era of migration for smallpox at some point before the 6th century the virus got its tendrils into india and china where cults devoted to smallpox deities sprang up by the 6th century it had reached japan alongside the weird cross-cultural belief that it could be stopped by the color red come the 11th century the crusade spread the disease far and wide afflicting corners of europe that had never been hit before not long after portuguese colonists were introducing it to parts of africa making smallpox a truly global scourge but the biggest most dramatic migration came in the early 16th century a decade or so after columbus discovered it smallpox finally set foot in the new world by now it was more feared in europe than even the black death yet it was destined to give the europeans a bit of a helping hand in 1520 a ship carrying someone infected with smallpox often said to be a slave landed on the shores of mexico this was the year of hernan cortez's expedition into mesoamerica's heartland into the aztec empire as the europeans marched on the pox trailed in their wake it wasn't long before it was wreaking havoc smallpox was unlike anything the indigenous people's immune systems had ever encountered before it overwhelmed them it devastated them if smallpox was a nightmare for europe then for mesoamerica it was nothing short of the apocalypse that october 1520 smallpox ravaged the great aztec capital of tenochtitlan up to 40 percent of the population died as the aztecs recorded it the plague lasted for 70 days striking everywhere in the city and killing a vast number of our people sores erupted on our faces our breasts our bellies we were covered with agonizing saws from head to foot the europeans were more detached as the indians did not know the remedy of the disease wrote one of cortis team they died in heaps like bedbugs however you look at it smallpox was devastating for the aztecs when cortes conquered tenochtitlan in 1521 it was in large part because european germs had already killed so many of its citizens nor would the aztec empire be the only one torn down by the virus in the andes smallpox arrived ahead of the europeans in 1528 the incan ruler wayne and kwarpak was carried off by it his death sparked a civil war between his two airs that helped spread smallpox across the inca lands in some places it killed 65 to 90 percent of the population by the time francisco pizarro arrived in 1532 the empire was barely clinging on bizarro just delivered the killing blow but it wasn't just in south america that smallpox made its presence felt not just below the border where it changed history up in the north the colonists would even find a despicable use for it but just before we get into what happened there i do want to take a moment to tell you about today's sponsor dollar shave club now dollar shave club covers all of your grooming needs shower oral care deodorants and of course and most importantly shaving now i don't shave my beard you can see that but i do shave my head and you know that experience has become a lot better since i switched to dollar shave club and they're high quality blades and also the high quality handles 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dollars also why not round out your grooming routine by adding some other high quality products after that the restock box ships full size products at the regular price and uh let's get back to the video shall we because it's about to get fairly horrific if it hasn't been horrific enough already [Music] contrary to what you may have heard smallpox wasn't deliberately introduced into the native american population by colonists in fact it had already swept the americas like wildfire passing from indigenous group to indigenous group like a really crappy game of past the parcel where every single prize is over half your population dying horribly the year before the mayflower arrived an epidemic in what is now new england killed up to 90 percent of the locals yet even if the colonists weren't standing outside their cabins cheerfully handing out infected blankets they were still on the pox's side when an outbreak hit massachusetts in 1633 plenty of puritans believed the grim native death toll was a gift from god but let's back up a moment and discuss those blankets there's a good chance you clicked on this video expected to hear tales of colonists deliberately giving smallpox to natives it's one of the iconic images in the giant picture book titled how the native americans got screwed over despite its vast reputation though this scene only played out a single time the year was 1763 the last year of the french and indian war that spring shawnee and mingo warriors laid siege to fort pitt in what is now pittsburgh smallpox was already inside the fort and the commander wrote to his superiors worrying that it would spread so his superior wrote back saying why let all that good smallpox go to waste across two letters sir jeffrey amherst commander-in-chief of the british forces in north america wrote could it not be contrived to send the smallpox among those disaffected tribes of indians we must on this occasion use every stratagem in our power to reduce them try every other method that can serve to extirpate this excremal sick race interestingly we don't know if amherst's instructions were actually followed what we do know is that a militia captain at the fort one william trent had already tried giving diplomats from the attacking tribes a couple of blankets infected with the parks and that was it that one documented time that colonists tried to deliberately give native american smallpox to be brutally honest though while a obviously despicable thing to do it probably didn't make a difference smallpox was already in the native american population there were already major outbreaks happening around fort pitt the moment european germs touched america's shores the natives were already doomed but while it had been europeans who spread smallpox to the new world it would also be a european who finally stopped it in its tracks because it's time to meet edward jenner by the time the 18th century rolled around smallpox had become just a gross fact of life in europe alone it killed 400 000 people a year including some of the very top of society peter ii of russia mary ii of england louis xv of france were all carried away by the disease it had also acquired its name smallpox which was meant to differentiate it from the great parks or what we'd now call syphilis yet even as europe suffered other continents were already bringing smallpox under control varialation is thought to have started in 10th century china and india before spreading west into the ottoman empire the process was as low-tech as it was bath-inducing basically you'd take the puss of someone infected with small box then make a load of cuts in the arm of a healthy person and insert the pus inside them a couple of weeks later a healthy person would come down with a mild case of smallpox recover and have lifelong immunity broadly speaking this worked while the normal risk of death from smallpox was around 30 only around 0.5 percent died from variation but this method wasn't perfect although very elated people rarely died they were infectious this could easily pass on a much more serious case to those who were around them it also required you to have a constant supply of patients with smallpox whose pus you could take and insert into healthy people so as great as variation was compared to you know dying of smallpox it could still be improved luckily someone was about to do just that edward jenner was a surgeon living in gloucestershire a bucolic slice of england famed for its dairy industry it was also famed for its cow pox a virus that tended to affect the hands of milkmaids leaving their fingers covered in unsightly pustules but here's the thing none of those cowpox-infected milkmaids ever seemed to catch smallpox the popular version of this story is that jenna was the first person to notice this but that's not actually true pretty much all the locals were aware that cowpox meant no smallpox a farmer called benjamin jeste had even used cowpox material to deliberately inoculate his sons against smallpox in 1774 but then he forgot to tell anyone about this world-changing breakthrough so it was left to jenna to discover it independently in 1796 jenner asked a family he knew if he could borrow their eight-year-old son james phipps he then took some cowbox bus from a milkmaid named sarah nelms and inserted it into phipps's skin after phipps had recovered from a mild case of cowpox jenna then exposed the boy to smallpox repeatedly but fortunately nothing happened to him james phipps he was immune to the virus today hearing that story mostly makes us think of holy crap that dude tried to literally give a child smallpox what the hell olden times but make no mistake this was a breakthrough that put varialation to shame jenna named his new technique vaccination after the latin for cow barely had he coined the term then the first anti-vaxxers came crawling out of the woodwork the royal society told jenna he shouldn't promulgate such a wild idea if he valued his reputation yet promulgate jenna did in his 1798 treatise on vaccination he declared the annihilation of the smallpox the most dreadful scourge of the human species must be the final result of this practice his words landed like a bomb napoleon called vaccination the greatest gift of our time thomas jefferson told jenna mankind can never forget that you have lived by 1810 both bavaria and denmark had made vaccination mandatory in the following decades the vaccinations slowly spread around the globe but jenna's dream of a world without smallpox would never materialize even as cases plunged the virus still stubbornly clung on it still ruined lives even as the 20th century reached its midpoint but not for much longer by the beginning of the cold war much of the west had already defeated smallpox the last u.s case was in 1949 three years later north america was declared smallpox free a year after that europe followed suit but even as parts of the world defeated the virus others were still left in its lethal grip as late as 1967 there were still some 10 to 15 million smallpox cases globally with parts of latin america africa and asia hit badly but 1967 was also smallpox's last hurrah that same year the world health organization or who announced a plan to eradicate it completely it was an immediate unqualified success the speed at which smallpox was brought to heal seems dizzying today by 1971 just four years after the program began it had been eradicated in latin america this success was due to a new technique that emphasized contact tracing and mass vaccination and new tech that included a freeze-dried heat-stable virus to use in vaccinations in late 1975 the final case was reported in asia rahima banu was a three-year-old girl living in bangladesh when she contracted variola major a local eight-year-old reported her to the who responded with a massive lockdown rahima banu was isolated at home under 24-hour surveillance every household within 2.5 kilometers was mass vaccinated and every public space within eight kilometers was disinfected it sounds like overkill but it worked when banu recovered variola major was dead in the wind two years later vario lamina struck for the last time ali meow marlin was a hospital worker in somalia tasked with looking after africa's last smallpox patients on october 22nd 1977 he himself came down with the disease and was quarantined he recovered that november and that was it for smallpox in africa but the last ever case of smallpox new ministry wouldn't happen in rural bangladesh or out in somalia it would happen in england in the summer of 1978 hospital photographer janet parker began suffering a headache and bad muscle pain shortly after red welts appeared across her body stumped her doctors tried all sorts of diagnoses it wasn't until she had been ill for two weeks that someone realized it was smallpox by then it was too late on september the 11th 1978 janet parker became the last person in history to die from smallpox although smallpox wouldn't kill anyone else in birmingham the tragedy still claimed additional victims the site of parker covered in pustules caused her father to have a fatal heart attack when the source of the outbreak was traced to a lab in the university building parker worked in the head of the microbiology department slit his own throat finally on may 8 1980 the who declared the planet smallpox free after a millennia of terror humanity's worst plague had been defeated today the disease exists only in two carefully guarded labs one in atlanta and one in siberia critics say these last samples should be destroyed lest they escape into the wild but supporters say the samples may one day become necessary like if a new strain of pox similar to smallpox evolves naturally but rather than focusing on the negatives let's end this video on a high note for three decades smallpox stood alone as an anomaly the one disease in history would ever manage to eradicate then in 2011 it was joined by another bovine reindeer pest was called the measles of cattle killing entire herds until we finally managed to stamp it out and we like to think of it as sort of a late thank you present to cows for cowpox and ryan de peste may not be the last currently guinea worm is the target of an intense eradication campaign when the program started in 1986 there were over 3.5 million cases a year in 2019 there were fewer than 60. the story of smallpox then is both a terrifying story of death and destruction but also one of hope for the first time ever in the face of a disease almost as old as civilization itself humankind was able to come together and not just combat it but wipe it out barring an accident at one of those labs no one will ever again know the pain of losing someone to smallpox while covert 19 has showed us that disease is still something humanity has to fear the eradication of smallpox is evidence that we really can overcome it given enough cooperation given enough funding it really is possible to rid the world of a mobster smallpox's tail may have lasted millennia and cost millions of lives but it is now finally over the last chapter has ended and this time happily there won't be a sequel so i really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to support our sponsors who make these videos possible that today would be dollar shave club who i will link to below and thank you for watching you

Channel: Biographics

Views: 601,876

Rating: 4.9329143 out of 5

Keywords: biographics, biography, biographies, people, famous people, simon whistler, Smallpox, Smallpox origin, Smallpox epidemic, Smallpox outbreak, Smallpox transmission, Smallpox facts, Smallpox history

Id: Ay8R3pa7pUw

Length: 23min 25sec (1405 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 10 2020