BARBARIC SCENE ACCURATE
HBO miniseries on "John Adams" demonstrates early form of vaccination for smallpox
Date published: 3/19/2008
BY JIM HALL
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.
Jim Hall: 540/374-5433
Email: jhall@freelancestar.com
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Date published: 3/19/2008
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