CHENNAI: Edward Jenner discovered vaccination using cowpox matter in 1796. However, evidences of widespread use of vaccination, rather ‘variolation’, prior to 1796, in several parts of the world exist. The variolation method used in general involved using human smallpox matter to inoculate susceptible persons previously unexposed to the deadly form of smallpox. According to Greenough, “the inoculee gets an attenuated case of smallpox — lower fever and less exanthema which is very rarely fatal and confers immunity from further infection.” It differs chiefly from vaccination in that an inoculated person is fully contagious whereas a vaccinated person is not. Variolation practice, brought into Europe in the 17th century, was practiced among the Polish, Greek, French, and Welsh peasants. The Chinese practiced a method of blowing the dust of powdered scabs from persons previously infected with at a mild level, into the nostrils of the susceptible person. A 1714 Royal Society of London report refers to a Constantinople practice, which consisted in skin scarification at 2-4 places with a needle from a bottle variolous matter freshly taken from the pustules of a naturally infected person, until blood appeared. Patrick Russell (who came to the Coramandel and worked on the snakes of southern India), the British physician practicing medicine in Aleppo (then the Ottoman Empire, now, Syria) in 1726, reported this method in one of the meetings of the Royal Society of London on May 5, 1768.The earliest report of variolation from India dates to 1731 in an informal report by one Robert Coult: “Their method of performing this operation is by taking a little of the pus (when the smallpox are come to maturity and are of a good kind) and dipping these in the point of a pretty large sharp needle. Therewith make several punctures in the hollow under the deltoid muscle or sometimes in the forehead, after which they cover the part with a little paste made of boiled rice. The feaver insues later or sooner, according to the age and strength of the person inoculated, but commonly the third or fourth days. They keep the patient under the coolest regimen they can think of before the feaver comes on and frequently use cold bathing.” This represented a new method, which greatly reduced chances of spread and eruption of the more severe form of the disease and therefore ‘safe’. This safer method from India never seems to have been introduced in Europe.Donald Hopkins (Center for Disease Control in Atlanta) leans towards India as the originator of the scarification method of variolation. He bases his thinking on the words of Walter Gavin King, who based his words from a translation of a text on variolation with both cow and human pox attributed to the Danvantari Nikandu, supposedly written 2,000 years before Jenner: “Take the fluid of the pock on the udder of the cow and on the area between the shoulder and elbow of a human subject on the point of a lancet, and lance with it the arms between the shoulders and elbows until the blood appears. There, mixing this fluid with the blood, the fever of the smallpox will be produced.” However, in subsequent pages of his book Princes and peasants: smallpox in history, Hopkins doubts the validity of this claim. Lord Ampthill (Arthur Villiers Russell, 1869–1935, Governor of Madras, 1900–1906) expressed this point at the inauguration of the King Institute of Preventive Medicine in Madras in 1905. Ralph Nicholas indicates that in 16th century India only a humoral (that all diseases occurred from the four recognized humors) and theurgic (that diseases were due to either divine curse or magic) explanation for small pox existed; variolation is not mentioned in any Sanskrit and Bengali texts. However, what needs to be reckoned with is that Colonel King working as the sanitary Commissioner of Madras Presidency may have had access to Tamizh texts, which have not been thoroughly researched.(The author is a senior lecturer in Ecological Agriculture at Charles Sturt University, Orange, New South Wales, Australia)
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