Wednesday 9 December 2020

variola major

With humankind since the beginning, claiming at least half-a-billion lives over the ages, scarring and maiming countless more, and surely the inspiration for all manner of curse and blight and vengeful and contractual god, on this day in 1979—after centuries of observation that a bit of homeopathy was promising innoculation and informing a more potent technique for Edward Jenner in 1796, able to later route the contagion’s last few sanctuaries and hiding places, a group of eminent epidemiologists, later confirmed by global public health agencies, were able to declare the eradication of smallpox. That is no small feat to banish the plague that informed and entangled an incredible portion of what we are as beings.