Blankets

[Matthew P Wiener]

David Casseres wrote:

>Tom STanton sez

>>I thought I'd stay out too, but what the hell--vis the infected blanket,
>>unless I'm way off, at the time no one had discovered how diseases
>>were communicated in a population.  [...]

>I'm pretty sure the idea of contagion via physical contact -- including
>contact with infected clothes, etc. -- was already fairly well accepted,
>even though germs were unknown.  [...]

The practice of innoculating children--injecting extract of smallpox pustules
from a survivor who had a mild case--was known for centuries.  It became quite
quite common in England during the 18th century after the royal family started
doing it in 1722.  It had a death rate of about 2-3%.

Jenner's revolutionary innovation was to innoculate with cowpox extract, and
achieved an essentially 0% death rate.  ("vaccinus" is Latin for bovine.)

In those days, they believed in "imbalanced humours" were the root causes of
disease.  (When they did not believe in capricious divine punishment.)  But
they believed one could transfer an imbalance.  They certainly knew about
epidemics.
--
-Matthew P Wiener (weemba at sagi.wistar.upenn.edu)    If Apple owned
 NBC, they would sue Nike for comedy-interface copyright violation.