Smallpox Treatment

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Recommended: Vaccination Against Smallpox

Smallpox Treatment

Smallpox has threatened our world for the past twelve thousand years. Treatments were desperately searched for until a cure called variolation was discovered. Variolation is the use of the virus placed into a being to which they will receive the illness to a lesser degree and overcome the illness forming an immunization to it. This process was started in China and went worldwide after Lady Montagu took the process from Turkey and informed the British about it. From here the process set fire and spread across Europe, curing many, but also killing them too. This new discovery opened a channel of research for many doctors, until in 1774 a farmer named Benjamin Jesty discovered that the lesser illness of cowpox could vaccinate one from smallpox. Jesty’s discovery plagued the world and set another opening for research, into which doctors searched for the best way to vaccinate citizens with. Vaccination helped a plethora of people until 1980 when the disease was finally eradicated. However, smallpox’s ugly face reared itself just recently with the new threat of bioterrorism. Yet this will most likely not affect our society due to the huge amount of preparatory work that would need to be placed into a new smallpox outbreak.

For the past twelve thousand years, Smallpox has obliterated societies with ease. Many civilizations found ways to inoculate their citizens with the least amount of symptoms through processes known as variolation and vaccination. Development of the treatment for smallpox mostly began in the end of the eighteenth century and continued through 1970s, until smallpox was eradicated in 1980.

Smallpox is thought to have first started in Africa and then moved to...

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... Vaccine. 1st ed. Vol. 1. London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, 1981. 1-196.

Brannon, Heather. "The History of Smallpox." About.Com. 24 Sept. 2005. Health on the Net Foundation. 26 July 2007

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"The First Recorded Smallpox Vaccination." The Dorset Page. 2000. The Dorset Page. 27 July 2007 .

Krasner, Gary. "Smallpox Vaccination Dangers." NaturoDoc. 2007. NaturoDoc LLC. 27 July 2007

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Ogden, Horace G.. CDC and the Smallpox Crusade. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1987.

Razzell, Peter. Edward Jenner's Cowpox Vaccine: the History of a Medical Myth. 1st ed. Vol. 1. Great Britain: Caliban Books, 1977. 5-107.

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