BARBARIC SCENE ACCURATE ["John Adams" miniseries]

Fredericksburg.com ^ | 3-19-08 | JIM HALL

[Pharmboy]

HBO miniseries on "John Adams" demonstrates early form of vaccination for smallpox

For many who watched Sunday night's airing of "John Adams," the new HBO series, one scene seemed almost barbaric:

A doctor makes incisions with a lancet in the arms of Abigail Adams and her children and places smallpox material directly into the wounds.

Abigail Adams believed that you could protect healthy people by injecting them with a deadly disease. Wouldn't that be just as dangerous as hanging around with the infected soldiers shown in the movie?

No, Abigail knew what she was doing when she insisted that her family be inoculated. One of the children developed a severe case of smallpox, but Abigail and the other children developed mild cases. All survived the treatment and the epidemic.

The technique in the miniseries was known as variolation, an early form of vaccination. It was based on the same principle: Introduce a sample or weakened form of a virus into the body and you can fool the immune system into action.

The body produces antibodies to attack the invader.

"Those antibodies are protective," said Dr. Paul A. Fiore, a Fredericksburg infectious disease expert.

The antibodies not only battle the virus but also hang around afterwards to protect against future attacks.

Adams could have known about variolation. The technique was at least a hundred years old by the time of the Revolutionary War.

Lady Mary Wortley Montague, the wife of a British ambassador, is said to have brought the treatment back to England in the early 1700s after seeing it in what is now Turkey.

Twenty years after the Revolution, Edward Jenner, an English country doctor, noticed that milkmaids who had contracted cowpox, a mild form of smallpox, did not get smallpox. He guessed correctly that they had developed an immunity.

Jenner tested his theory by injecting a young boy in the village with cowpox, and then later with smallpox. The boy did not get sick.

Smallpox killed countless people in Adams' time. As late as the 20th century, it was responsible for 300 million deaths.

Today, thanks to a worldwide vaccination program, smallpox is gone. The last recorded case was in Somalia in 1977. The World Health Organization declared it eradicated in 1980.

[Pharmboy]

Good explanation for this--I was a bit confused by this scene.

[SmithL]

I admit that I winced.

[Fledermaus]

I’m taping the series and will sit down and watch all of it in a day or two some weekend. Haven’t had time and my wife has been traveling.

[C19fan]

I believe George Washington ordered the inoculation of the whole Continental Army using this method. It was very risky because the army would be incapacitated for several weeks as the men fought off the infection.

[The_Reader_David]

As an aside, ‘liberals’ often vilify Cotton Mather as an anti-scientific obscurantist with the false accusation he was opposed to vaccination (infection with cowpox to evoke an immune response to smallpox).

Mather was in fact opposed to innoculation with smallpox (as depicted in the Adams household in the series), and attacked its enforcement by European states, arguing against the adoption of the practice in America.

Of course the same liberals are all up in arms about a mild statistical link between clearly beneficial innoculations (with dead or crippled baccili and viruses) and autism, oddly echoing Mather’s contention that it was wrong to save many by deliberately inflicting harm on random individuals.

[NonValueAdded]

IIRC, laws were passed a the time outlawing the practice yet a deadly outbreak led to desperation, and “innoculations” were peeformed by Drs. Warren and Church. It worked.

[Pharmboy]

Yes...you are correct. And lucky for us, The General contracted smallpox the "natural" way on a trip to Barbados with his older half-brother Lawrence in 1750, so he was quite immune when it was the scourge of the colonies during the RevWar.

The pox left him with a pitted nose.

[C19fan]

When I saw the title I thought it was the scene I have read about of some bureaucratic getting tar and feathered.

[Pharmboy]

The RevWar/Colonial History/Gen. Washington ping list

Freepmail me if you want on or off

[Pharmboy]

EXACTLY what I thought too...

[Moonman62]

Yet the General would have survived what was his fatal illness, had a tracheotomy been performed rather than blood letting.

[Pharmboy]

I am not certain he even needed a tracheostomy, as he was able to speak until the end (his last words were “’Tis well”),so I am do not think he had severe respiratory distress (I am a physician). His physicians killed him by bleeding him, for sure. He likely had a strep throat or a bad viral pharyngitis.

[aculeus]

I thought this would be about the tar and feather scene!

[Misterioso]

How’s the weather over there?

[TenthAmendmentChampion]

Twenty years after the Revolution, Edward Jenner, an English country doctor, noticed that milkmaids who had contracted cowpox, a mild form of smallpox, did not get smallpox.

That's where the expression, "she had a complexion like a milkmaid" came from. Their faces were never marked by the characteristic smallpox pock marks.

[nhoward14]

That’s what I expected, also.

[Viking2002]

I had chicken pox do the same thing to me as a boy, to a small degree: I have two little, pinhead-sized scars on the bridge of my nose, one on either side, in the exact same locations. Up close (REAL close), it almost looks like a second set of tiny nostrils that never opened.

[Pharmboy]

I knew the Jenner story, but never knew that’s where the expression came from...thanks for the info.

[mware]

I thought early versions of the smallpox vaccine used cow pox instead of small pox.

[Pharmboy]

Jenner came later. This is what they did back before the cowpox technique of Jenner.