How Immunization Won the Revolutionary War

Living through a pandemic has been a strange and difficult affair for everyone, especially for those who have been lost to us, those who have lost loved ones, and those still dealing with long-term affects of Covid. Thankfully, we can see a light at the end of this dark tunnel with the introduction of vaccines. I am currently a stay-at-home mom, but worked as a registered nurse for several years beforehand. Something I keep hearing when it comes to fears about the new vaccines concerns how quickly they were made. These fears can be put to rest when faced with the fact that vaccines have been studied and made for well over a century and while this particular vaccine is new, the creation of vaccines is not. It is not my purpose to persuade anyone, however, but to delve into how inoculation, an earlier form of immunization, came to be such a necessary practice and how it actually helped America gain its independence.

Smallpox was both deadly and debilitating. Those who did not die were often left with scarring from the pustules that came with the virus. Signs of these pustules have actually been identified on the mummified remains of the Pharaoh Ramses V, telling us that smallpox existed for quite a long time before its eventual eradication. Just as Covid has spread quickly throughout the world with travel, smallpox spread via exploration. Sores would appear in an infected person’s mouth and throat, making him or her contagious as they coughed or sneezed. Another way to contract the virus was by handling materials with infected droplets on them. The sores would then spread as a rash all over the body. Inoculation was used as early as 1000 CE in China before being used by people in Europe and the Americas. Viral material (pus in this case) was taken from the sores of an infected person and placed in someone who was healthy, with the hopes of making them immune. It was also called variolation, named for the virus it was meant to protect against.

So what does this have to do with America’s independence? A smallpox epidemic hit America in 1775, the same year the Revolutionary War began. The epidemic would last until 1782, threatening to take out the lives of civilians and soldiers alike. In fact, disease in general killed more American soldiers than the British did. The British were less likely to suffer from outbreaks of smallpox because of previous exposure or inoculation, which they had already been practicing. After losing so many soldiers to this illness, George Washington carried out a mass immunization policy, ordering all soldiers to be inoculated immediately. One of his biggest fears concerning the war was losses from this illness, leaving them with too few soldiers to fight off their enemies. Soldier camps were vulnerable to such outbreaks because of the conditions and shared space. Social distancing wasn’t exactly a protocol during the Revolutionary War, though many colonies did try quarantining when the sickness reached them. This was not as effective, however, because many colonies did not enforce quarantine well enough, leading to more deaths than were necessary. Also, if the need to escape arose during a siege, sick colonists would flee alongside the healthy, spreading the virus further. Without immunizing the soldiers, most would have died from the disease, leading to America possibly losing the war.

Later, in 1796, an English doctor named Edward Jenner would go on to create a safer way to immunize healthy people against smallpox. After observing that milkmaids who contracted cowpox (a much milder illness) seemed to be protected from smallpox, he tested a theory that viral material from cowpox patients could be used for inoculation. He took viral material from a cowpox pustule on a milkmaid’s hand and placed it into a nine year old boy’s arm. As immoral (and illegal) as such a study would be today, it worked. The boy was purposefully exposed to smallpox many times and never contracted it. As the trend spread, people who were inoculated had mild fevers and rashes, but no further symptoms of the disease. This form of vaccination was safer than the original variolation, and Jenner surmised that it would ultimately put an end to smallpox forever.

It is amazing to think that without inoculating the soldiers, America might have lost the war or at least been at war a lot longer. The losses would have been more severe without protection against the disease. America wasn’t just in a war against the British, but with smallpox as well. Washington made the right choice and America ultimately won its independence. Small pox is no longer a problem for us, today, thanks to medical and technological advances with vaccines. The WHO declared the world free of the disease in May of 1980, having succeeded in their efforts to immunize people against it. We now have vaccines for other terrible illnesses as well, and I, for one, am glad to have them as injections rather than in the form of pus from a sick person being deposited into me. I look forward to getting my own vaccine in this current pandemic and when I do, I’ll remember how immunization has changed history and saved lives.