Tuesday, December 14, 2021

What's her name, that milkmaid

"Women and the Cowpox Vaccine"

https://www.ladyscience.com/features/women-and-the-cowpox-vaccine-2021


Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the figure of the “anti-vax mom” has loomed large in the public consciousness and the popular press...the societal hyperfixation on the mother specifically—after all, if these unvaccinated children are being brought up by a cis heterosexual couple, then presumably they have a father who is also weighing in on medical decisions—deserves careful scrutiny."

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“After the princess royal died of smallpox in 1660, Thomas Shipman wrote an elegy entitled 'Beauty’s Enemy' in which he laments not merely the young woman’s untimely death but her vanished charms, which he attempts to turn around through the use of rather clumsy heavenly metaphors: 'Each Spot upon her Face a Comet show'd, / which did, alas, this fatal ruine bode!'”  

"Before the availability of the vaccine, the most trusted method of smallpox prevention was a procedure known as variolation, in which patients were exposed to the pus or scabs of smallpox survivors with the goal of provoking a mild case that would spare them the disease’s most devastating effects. The technique was popularized in Britain in the 18th century by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, herself a smallpox survivor, who observed that in Ottoman Turkey the procedure was carried out systematically by old women. And Jenner could not have completed his now-famous cowpox experiment without Sarah Nelmes, the milkmaid who allowed him to take a sample from her infected hand to test his hypothesis that exposure to smallpox’s tamer bovine cousin would provide immunity to one of the great diseases of the age."

Thanks to the milkmaid et al.

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