The Little Villains Call’d the Smallpox

Dr. Edward Jenner vaccinating an adult, from Real Heroes Comics, Issue 15, page 31.

The history of vaccination is quite interesting.*
Many of us have read that British physician Edward Jenner (1749-1823), vaccinated people in the late 1700s.
However, smallpox vaccination has a long history, before 1796.
Dr. Jenner was responsible for refining the process (using cowpox pus instead of smallpox pus) so that people wouldn’t die, or become very ill, after a smallpox vaccination.

A Chinese man with pustules, and variolation (the practice of inoculating people with smallpox pus).

The first reference to smallpox inoculation (1549), in medical literature, was made by Chinese pediatrician Wan Quan (1499-1582). Variolation (the practice of inoculating people with smallpox pus) became common place in China in the late 1500’s.
The technique had a mortality rate as high as one death per thousand patients, but patients who under went it were immune to smallpox.
Since smallpox itself had a 20-30% mortality rate, patients were willing to undergo the procedure.
Variolation spread to Africa, and parts of Europe.

Onesimus explained the practice of smallpox vaccination to Cotton Mather.

Around 1706, Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather (a Harvard graduate) learned of vaccination from one of his slaves, a man called Onesimus.
Onesimus had been vaccinated in Africa, years before he was brought to America, and enslaved.
Mather went on to promote vaccination during the Boston smallpox epidemic of 1721-1722.
(Mather finally released Onesimus from slavery in 1716.)
You can read the full comic strip that I excerpted HERE!

In 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) introduced the idea of smallpox vaccination to the British royalty.
Lady Montagu was the wife of the British Ambassador to Turkey.
That is where she had learned about inoculations.
Montagu had both of her own children vaccinated against smallpox, and encouraged the royal family to do the same.

The cover of Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82, by Elizabeth A. Fenn (published in 2001).

In 1777, General George Washington ordered that the entire Continental Army be inoculated, because of the 1775-1782 smallpox epidemic during the Revolutionary War.
General Washington had had a mild case of smallpox in 1751, so he was already immune.

As I learned in Dearest Friend (a biography of First Lady Abigail Adams by Lynne Withey), the entire John Adams family underwent smallpox inoculations.
John Adams (the second U.S. President) was inoculated in 1763, before he married Abigail.
In a letter to his fiancé, he joked that he:

must permit the little Villains call’d the small Pox to have their Feast this Spring. [colonial-era spelling, and capitalization]

Mrs. Adams, and several of the Adams children, were inoculated in 1775.
This procedure usually took at least six to seven weeks.
First, the secluded patients would take various debilitating medications (laxatives and diuretics), preparing themselves for inoculation.
Then, they’d be infected with the virus, and (hopefully) merely experience a mild form of the disease.
Two of the Adams children became dangerously ill, but that was common at the time.

British DVD cover from 80,000 Suspects (1963) a British film about a smallpox epidemic in the city of Bath.

The American Medical Association didn’t push for compulsory smallpox vaccination until 1899.
Some American citizens did rebel.
In 1905, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Jacobson vs Massachusetts, and ruled that it was within the authority of local governments to make vaccination requirements of their citizens, and to levy fines against those who resisted.
There were still smallpox outbreaks around the world, as late as the 1970’s.

The “Vaccination and Immunization” article, in volume 23 of Collier’s Encyclopedia, points out that no vaccine is 100% effective.
Factors like age, nutritional status, and overall immunologic competence can make a vaccine much less effective.
Vaccinations, like medicines, act differently on different people, and medical studies try to determine what’s what.
There can also be side effects with vaccination, sometimes serious side effects.
However, just because vaccines don’t work 100% of the time, or occasionally cause side effects, doesn’t indicate that we should rid ourselves of vaccines.
Isn’t that just throwing the baby out with the bath water?

Still from The Killer That Stalked New York, a 1950 movie, in which public health doctors seek a diamond-smuggler spreading smallpox.

On September 17, 2025, Senator Rand Paul interrogated former CDC Director Susan Monarez, PhD, about the COVID-19 vaccine.
They argued whether the vaccine reduces hospitalization for children under 18, and whether the CDC should change recommendations for infants under six months old.
Ms. Monarez was appearing before the Senate, because in August of 2025, she had been fired for refusing to loyally rubber stamp all of RFK Jr’s vaccine policies, sight unseen!

This change in attitude toward vaccination, from 1776 to 2025, is fascinating.
250 years ago, John Adams, his family, and the entire colonial army, took a risk, so they would not live in fear of those “little villains call’d the smallpox.”
People of the time joked about “the smallpox,” even though they greatly feared it.
Today, around 23% of Americans don’t trust scientists as a group (Pew Research Center).
Some say that it isn’t enough if a vaccine just minimizes their disease symptoms.
Any vaccine has to be “perfect,” and work in every case, for them to roll up their sleeves.
In 1776, smallpox vaccination was a long risky process.
Today, some folks believe that one almost risk-free injection is an imposition on their freedom.

*Most, but not all, facts pertaining to vaccination are taken from the “Vaccination and Immunization” article in volume 23 of Collier’s Encyclopedia. Fun fact that I didn’t find in Collier’s, but did discover in the above comic book about Onesimus: Ben Franklin was against smallpox inoculation in his youth. However, he accepted its’ usefulness when he reached adulthood.

Working for the Common Good

During Al Capone’s reign in Chicago, he was known for being generous to the poor by setting up soup kitchens.

In Chapter One of Al Capone’s Beer Wars: A Complete History of Organized Crime in Chicago During Prohibition, author John J. Binder, offers the opinion that some immigrants to Chicago:

Brought with them a belief . . . that the system was there to be exploited by individuals for their personal gain as opposed to the idea that individuals worked for the common good. [Italics mine.]

Binder was trying to put the Chicago “Beer Wars” into context.
He was explaining why immigrants from the semi-feudal worlds of Italy, Ireland, Germany, and Russia, worked to exploit American society: some by building legal businesses, and others by building illegal businesses.
(Based on my own family history, I’m quite sure that many Italian-Americans were a lot more idealistic citizens than Binder imagined.)

In the conclusion of his book, Binder gives Capone an A minus, for his work as a professional gangster.
These were his reasons for this “less than perfect” grade:

He had strong business sense and excellent martial skills . . . However, his public behavior . . .put him [too much] in the spotlight” and he should have filed his income tax returns.

A portrait of Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) by George Catlin, after a painting by Thomas Sully.

Founding Father Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), as a thinker, was more concerned about “the Common Good” than many of the other Founding Fathers.
Jefferson was the son of a landowner, and he owned slaves throughout his life.
However, he did believe in Universal Suffrage, and in the ideals of Democracy (at least in theory).
He certainly didn’t believe in a “divine right” for English men, then only one-third of the population!
Jefferson also didn’t believe that the American system of slavery would continue many generations after his death.
(He left that disquieting problem for future generations to contend with.)

In 1813, idealist Jefferson wrote to John Adams (1735-1826) that Europe’s class system of “rank, birth, and tinsel-aristocracy will finally shrink into insignificance.”*

A few days before he died (in 1826), Jefferson wrote: 

The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately. . .*

Despite Jefferson’s materialism, he truly believed that only the American people could preserve our Democratic system.
He stipulated that our nation must become better educated, and more guided by the sciences.
(If this were not so, I think he feared that eventually we would lose our Democracy.)

A portrait of Abigail Adams by Jane Stuart (after Gilbert Stuart, circa 1800).

I just finished the biography Dearest Friend A Life of Abigail Adams (published in 1981) by Lynne Withey.
It’s about the wife of the nation’s first Vice President and second President, John Adams.
In Dearest Friend, I learned that Mr. and Mrs. John Adams (a couple who disliked the whole idea of political parties) switched from being Federalists to being Republicans, during their lifetimes.
Here’s a section:

Behind her growing conservatism was a profound distrust of the ordinary man or woman. Such people, she believed, were incapable of thinking rationally about important issues but would follow a charismatic leader blindly and could easily be duped by propaganda.

A deep materialism, and the goal of the “Common Good,” have been at war in the U.S. since its’ inception.
After the Revolutionary War, many of the elite colonialists fled to Canada.
When framing the Federal Government, the Founding Fathers bowed to the financial interests of the big plantation owners, and counted blacks as 5/8ths of a human being (for mainly financial reasons).
After the Civil War, many plantation owners received $300 payments, but only a few blacks received forty acres and a mule.
Since the beginning of this country, some Americans have considered true Democracy to be just a pipe dream, not really worth working on.

A scene from The Migrants, a 1974 TV movie about migratory farm workers, that starred Cloris Leachman (right) and Lisa Lucas (left).

When studying U.S. history, it’s evident that the English elite exploited both the non-English, and the English plebs, as North America was settled.
During the 1600s and 1700s, wild forests were farmed (and Native Americans murdered) through the use of slaves, English and Irish convicts, and the indentured servant system.
During the 1800s and 1900s, immigrants from Europe, and Asia, were used to build our cities and railroads, as well as staff our mines and factories.
A few immigrants (like Andrew Carnegie) became titans of industry, but most first-generation Americans worked long hours doing manual labor, in hopes that some of their children would eventually survive existence in the underclass.

The book Round Trip to American describes how many immigrants came to the U.S. for a while, found it not to their liking, and returned to their home countries (Europe or Asia).
Some migrants returned to Europe and Asia, and transformed their home countries into modern societies.

The massacre of the Chinese at Rock Springs, Wyoming, drawn by Lieutenant C.A. Booth. 7th U.S. Infantry. White miners slaughtered Chinese miners.

Trump talks about saving America by deporting immigrants, but his idea is not based on logic, or facts.
By deporting so many hard-working immigrants, he’s just disrupting profitable American companies.
Undocumented immigrants typically pay into the Social Security system, but then get nothing back, helping to keep the system solvent.
Throughout the history of this country, immigrants have always started more new businesses than the U.S. born.
Immigrants spend money on food and housing, increasing consumer spending.
Financially speaking, deporting immigrants by the thousands, is not a good move for the U.S. economy.

I guess that our relationship to the Constitution, and Democracy, is a bit like our relationship to marriage.
Some men (or women) vow never to commit the sin of adultery during the wedding ceremony.
A few years later, however, “the heart wants what it wants” and they are unfaithful to their wives (or husbands).

Charles H Bennett’s illustration of a coalman confronting a chimney sweep: “the pot calling the kettle black.”

I know that the folks who back Trump are hypersensitive about this idea of the Common Good.
Kevin Roberts (President of the Heritage Foundation) mischaracterizes Lefties (in Project 2025), saying that “The Left does not believe that all men are created equal. They believe they are superior.”
He mistakes idealism for self-righteousness.

Trump, and his supporters, swear that they believe in the Democratic system of government, and that the Left must “hate America.”
That’s the pot calling the kettle black.
Without a concern for the Common Good, Democracy will fail.

*Both of the Jefferson quotes are taken from Thomas Jefferson on Democracy, selected and arranged by Saul K Padover, Penguin, 1939.