Pox Americana: Elizaberth A Fenn

This was an interesting book on the effects of Smallpox. She points out a lot of interesting things I would never have given a thought to, mostly how much easier life is today without small pox. In the 15-16th centuries it would have been hard to find a person in Europe/ Africa that wasn't exposed to the Pox at least once every five years. If you survived you were usually scarred, but immune for the rest of your life. Then the Europeans came to the New World where the natives had never been exposed to the virus and since they all had similar immune systems the disease did not have to mutate much or at all to have a devastating impact. Where in Europe the number who died was up to 20-25% in the Americas the number could be 80% wiping out whole tribes. The book talks about the first attempts of inoculation and how much if the process was unnecessary- bleeding, poison, etc. and how many towns had banned the process because they didn't want to introduce the disease into the population. The book also talked about the revolutionary war and how people didn't want to fight and get exposed to small pox. Eventually they would march the thousands of troops to inoculation hospitals. As people moved around more the epidemic created a tidal wave of infection. In Mexico city the population went from 25 million to 2 million after an epidemic and the Sonora desert lost 90% of their native population. People would get sick and not be able to attend their crops, if they survived they wouldn't have any food and at a weakened state faced starvation. Lewis and Clark noted remnants of the disease on their travels well before Europeans got to the interior due to the natives extensive trade routes with one another.