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."
