Sound familiar?
Newly digitized records — including a minister’s diary scanned and posted online by Boston’s Congregational Library and Archives — are shedding fresh light on devastating outbreaks of smallpox that hit the city in the 1700s.
And three centuries later, the parallels with the coronavirus pandemic are uncanny.
“How little we’ve changed,” said CLA archivist Zachary Bodnar, who led the digitization effort, working closely with the New England Historic Genealogical Society.
“The fact that we’re finding these similarities in the records of our past is a very interesting parallel,” Bodnar said in an interview. “Sometimes the more we learn, the more we’re still the same, I guess.”
Smallpox was eradicated, but not before it sickened and killed millions worldwide. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the last natural outbreak of smallpox in the United States occurred in 1949. In 1980, the World Health Organization’s decision-making arm declared it eradicated, and no cases of naturally occurring smallpox have been reported since.
But in April 1721, after an English ship, the HMS Seahorse, brought it to Boston, it was a clear and present danger. By winter of 1722, it would infect more than half of the city’s population of 11,000 and kill 850.
Much earlier outbreaks, also imported from Europe, killed Native Americans indiscriminately in the 1600s. Now, digitized church records are helping to round out the picture of how the colonists coped when it was their turn to endure pestilence.
The world’s first proper vaccination didn’t occur until the end of that century, when an English country doctor named Edward Jenner inoculated an 8-year-old boy against smallpox in 1796.
Before then, doctors used inoculation, or variolation as it was often called, introducing a trace amount of the smallpox virus into the skin. The procedure, or variations of it, had been practiced since ancient times in Asia. Jenner’s pioneering of vaccination, using instead a less lethal strain of the virus that infected cows, was a huge scientific advance.
In this image provided by the American Ancestors & New England Historic Genealogical Society, a digitized copy of a page from a handwritten 18th century diary by the Rev. Ebenezer Storer, during a period of smallpox, in Boston, shows a March 1764 entry that includes a prayer Storer wrote after arranging to have his own children inoculated. In the prayer, Storer praises the discovery of means used in the late 18th century to treat the disease. (American Ancestors & New England Historic Genealogical Society via AP)
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