On an epidemic of smallpox of irregular type in Trinidad during 1902-1904

Abstract

Smallpox was so prevalent in prevaccination times j that hardly anyone escaped the disease. It entered the palace of the king with the same freedom as it did the hovel of the peasant; it penetrated everywhere carrying desolation with it. Those who escaped death were left disfigured or.crippled for life. Almost every face was seamed and scarred and on every side were not the blinded victims of the scourge. At times whole towns were depopulated. When the contagion fell in virgin soil it raged with special virulence and wrought dreadful havoc. Among the black races, whole tribes were extirpated; its ravages were then fearful to contemplate and the mortality which followed in its train was appalling. Macaulay in his History of England thus alludes to this scourge in speaking, of the death of Queen Mary from it in 1694: "That disease over which science has achieved a succession of glorious and beneficent victories was then the most terrible of all the ministers of death. The havoc of the plague had been more rapid, but the plague had visited our shores only once or trice within living memory. The smallpox was always present, filling the churchyard with corpses, tormenting with constant fears all those whom it had not yet stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning, the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered and making the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden objects of horror to her lover."