Word: smallpox
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Should the gray wolf, today an endangered species in most of the U.S., be re-established in Yellowstone? An old stockman at a meeting at Laramie, Wyo., shakes with rage at the notion; the idea is like reintroducing smallpox. But to wolf partisans, the bedrock argument is a brooding, circular truth: without wolves, there are no wolves. These complex, mysterious animals are their own justification. Beyond that, biologists see predators as balance wheels in ecosystems. No wolves mean too many elk, which is what Yellowstone has now, starving by the thousands in winter die-offs...
...steamboats brought artists and ethnologists. The bourgeois, or superintendent, maintained a splendid table, and French wine flowed in an imposing residence topped with a bell tower. With its bastions of stone and 63-ft. flagpole aflutter with Old Glory, Fort Union conveyed a flashy, mercantile style and substance until smallpox twice struck the Indians and homesteaders encroached on their lands, eclipsing the trade. By 1866 the once proud post had lapsed into disrepair, and the U.S. Army dismantled it. Five years ago, a local citizens' group spearheaded reconstruction of the flagpole. Then for three summers, a squad of 45 archaeologists...
...mysteries of this remarkable system, the ancients were aware of immunity. They knew from experience that anyone who survived certain diseases would not be likely to get them again. As early as the 11th century, Chinese doctors were manipulating the immune system. By blowing pulverized scabs from a smallpox victim into their patients' nostrils, they could often induce a mild case of the disease that prevented a more severe onslaught. In the 1700s, people rubbed their skin with dried scabs to protect themselves against the disease...
These primitive practices were introduced to England and the American colonies. In 1721 and 1722, during a smallpox epidemic, a Boston doctor named Zabdiel Boylston scratched the skin of his six-year-old son and 285 other people and rubbed pus from smallpox scabs into the wounds. All but six of his patients survived...
...much safer approach to immunology was made in 1796, when Edward Jenner decided it was more than coincidence that milkmaids stricken with a mild form of the cattle disease called cowpox were rarely victims of smallpox. He inoculated James Phipps, 8, with cowpox, then exposed him to smallpox six weeks later. The boy never came down with the disease, confirming that the immunization had worked. More than a century and a half passed before scientists knew the reason: the antigens on the cowpox virus are so similar to those on the smallpox virus that they can prime the immune system...