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Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index S > Category: Smallpox

Smallpox Quotes (14 quotes)

A propos of Distempers, I am going to tell you a thing that I am sure will make you wish your selfe here. The Small Pox so fatal and so general amongst us is here entirely harmless by the invention of engrafting (which is the term they give it). There is a set of old Women who make it their business to perform the Operation.
Letter to Sarah Chiswell (1 Apr 1717). In Robert Halsband (ed.), The Complete Letters of the Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1965), Vol. 1, 338.
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Biological evolution is a system of constant divergence without subsequent joining of branches. Lineages, once distinct, are separate forever. In human history, transmission across lineages is, perhaps, the major source of cultural change. Europeans learned about corn and potatoes from Native Americans and gave them smallpox in return.
…...
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By teaching us how to cultivate each ferment in its purity—in other words, by teaching us how to rear the individual organism apart from all others,—Pasteur has enabled us to avoid all these errors. And where this isolation of a particular organism has been duly effected it grows and multiplies indefinitely, but no change of it into another organism is ever observed. In Pasteur’s researches the Bacterium remained a Bacterium, the Vibrio a Vibrio, the Penicillium a Penicillium, and the Torula a Torula. Sow any of these in a state of purity in an appropriate liquid; you get it, and it alone, in the subsequent crop. In like manner, sow smallpox in the human body, your crop is smallpox. Sow there scarlatina, and your crop is scarlatina. Sow typhoid virus, your crop is typhoid—cholera, your crop is cholera. The disease bears as constant a relation to its contagium as the microscopic organisms just enumerated do to their germs, or indeed as a thistle does to its seed.
In 'Fermentation, and its Bearings on Surgery and Medicine', Essays on the Floating­Matter of the Air in Relation to Putrefaction and Infection (1881), 264.
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I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this usefull invention [smallpox inoculation] into fashion in England, and I should not fail to write to some of our Doctors very particularly about it, if I knew anyone of 'em that I thought had Virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of Revenue for the good of Mankind, but that Distemper is too beneficial to them not to expose to all their Resentment the hardy wight that should undertake to put an end to it.
Letter to Sarah Chiswell (1 Apr 1717). In Robert Halsband (ed.), The Complete Letters of the Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1965), Vol. 1, 339.
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I attained a triumph so complete that it is now rare to meet an American with marks of small pox on his face... Benefits are valuable according to their duration and extent, like the showers from heaven, but the benign remedy Vaccination saves millions of lives every century, like the blessing of the sun, universal and everlasting.
(Remark made near the end of his life.)
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I have patiently born with abundance of Clamour and Ralary [raillery], for beginning a new Practice here (for the Good of the Publick) which comes well Recommended, from Gentlemen of Figure & Learning, and which well agrees to Reason, when try’d & duly considered, viz. Artificially giving the Small Pocks, by Inoculation, to One of my Children, and Two of my Slaves, in order to prevent the hazard of Life… . and they never took one grain or drop of Medicine since, & are perfectly well.
By “clamour” he is referring to the public commotion in Boston reacting to his introduction of smallpox inoculation. Public statement in the Gazette (Jul 10-17), No. 85, 1721. As quoted and cited in Reginald H. Fitz, 'Zabdiel Boylston, Inoculator, and the Epidemic of Smallpox in Boston in 1721', Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital (1911), 22, 319.
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Of the Passive Principle, and Material Cause of the Small Pox ... Nature, in the first compounding and forming of us, hath laid into the Substance and Constitution of each something equivalent to Ovula, of various distinct Kinds, productive of all the contagious, venomous Fevers, we can possibly have as long as we live.
Exanthematologia: Or, An Attempt to Give a Rational Account of Eruptive Fevers, Especially of the Measles and SmallPox (1730), Part II, 'Of the Small-Pox', 175. In Ludvig Hektoen, 'Thomas Fuller 1654-1734: Country Physician and Pioneer Exponent of Specificness in Infection and Immunity', read to the Society (8 Nov 1921), published in Bulletin of the Society of Medical History of Chicago (Mar 1922), 2, 329, or in reprint form, p. 11.
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Statisticians tell us that for many years the death-rate from cancer has been slowly but steadily rising: and not unnaturally, many people conclude from this that for some reason or other we are becoming more susceptible to cancer. Actually, that conclusion does not follow at all. The rise in the cancer death-rate is probably due entirely to the fact that other causes of death have been reduced. Numbers of people who, if they had been born a century earlier, would have died in their twenties of typhoid or smallpox, say, are now living on into their seventies and dying of cancer.
From 'Figures Can Lie', Science Digest (Sep 1951), 30, No. 3, 53. (As condensed from The Listener). Excerpted in Meta Riley Emberger and Marian Ross Hall, Scientific Writing (1955), 407.
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The last few centuries have seen the world freed from several scourges—slavery, for example; death by torture for heretics; and, most recently, smallpox. I am optimistic enough to believe that the next scourge to disappear will be large-scale warfare—killed by the existence and nonuse of nuclear weapons.
Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist (1987), 152.
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The Pestilence can never breed the Small-Pox, nor the Small-Pox the Measles, nor they the Crystals or Chicken-Pox, any more than an Hen can breed a Duck, a Wolf a Sheep, or a Thistle Figs; and consequently, one Sort cannot be a Preservative against any other Sort.
In Ludvig Hektoen, 'Thomas Fuller 1654-1734: country physician and pioneer exponent of specificness in infection and immunity', Bulletin of the Society of Medical History of Chicago (Mar 1922), 2, 321. In the reprint of the paper alone, the quote is on page 3.
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The physical signs of measles are nearly the same as those of smallpox, but nausea and inflammation is more severe, though the pains in the back are less.
Avicenna
The Canon, Bk IV.
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They [the Haida] are a doomed race. Wars, smallpox, gross immorality, a change from old ways to new ways their fate is the common fate of the American, whether he sails the sea in the North, gallops over the plain in the West, or sleeps in his hammock in the forests of Brazil.
From Lecture on the Haida Indian Nation, delivered at the Field Columbian Museum (6 Nov 1897). Reproduced in 'A Cruise among Haida and Tlingit Villages About Dixon’s Entrance', Popular Science Monthly (Jun 1898), 164.
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While the vaccine discovery was progressive, the joy I felt at the prospect before me of being the instrument destined to take away from the world one of its greatest calamities [smallpox], blended with the fond hope of enjoying independence and domestic peace and happiness, was often so excessive that, in pursuing my favourite subject among the meadows, I have sometimes found myself in a kind of reverie.
John Baron, The Life of Dr. Jenner (1827), 140.
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Who could have believed that … the introduction into the human body of a small particle of matter from a cow’s udder might be the means of saving thousands of human lives? We learn from these and innumerable similar instances that the highest truths lie hid in the simplest facts; that, unlike human proclamations, nature’s teachings are not by sound of trumpet, but often in the stillest voice, by indirect hints and obscure suggestions.
From Address (Oct 1874) delivered at Guy’s Hospital, 'On The Study of Medicine', printed in British Medical journal (1874), 2, 425. Collected in Sir William Withey Gull and Theodore Dyke Acland (ed.), A Collection of the Published Writings of William Withey Gull (1896), 109.
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Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
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