9 - Smallpox and slavery

Summary

Say, as this malady but once infests

The sons of Guinea, might not skill ingraft

(Thus the small-pox are happily convey'd)

This ailment early to thy Negro-train?

James Grainger, M.D., 1764

This is the first of three chapters concerned with the health care system on West Indian slave plantations. This chapter takes up the dreaded plague of smallpox, its destruction of both white and black inhabitants, the great importance of preventive medicine in the form of variolation or inoculation and vaccination, and campaigns against smallpox in other New World colonies. Subsequent chapters will deal with slave hospitals and plantation medical practices.

Introduction

Smallpox or variola is an eruptive fever that was probably the deadliest of the early epidemic diseases of the Americas. It is an acute infectious virus disease characterized by vomiting, pain in the loins, fever, and eruptions that spread over the body; the eruptions are converted into pustules, which dry up into soft, yellow crusts that have a peculiar offensive odor. In the final stage the scabs fall off, leaving pitted scars or pock marks. Before Jenner's discovery of vaccination, smallpox reputedly killed, crippled, and disfigured one-tenth of all humans. The virulence of the disease varied according to conditions of poverty, overcrowding, migration of peoples and their microbes, as well as the ratio of immune to nonimmune inhabitants of a given community.

Smallpox was introduced into the West Indies in 1518-19, twenty-six years after the European discovery of America by Columbus, and contributed to the extermination of whole peoples.