I belong to the last generation that experienced smallpox as a living disease. It was eradicated from the earth – perhaps the greatest achievement in the history of humankind – when I was in primary school. No cure was ever discovered for it. Among its victims, the lucky ones were left disfigured; the slightly unlucky went blind as well, and the very unlucky, up to 30% of those infected, died. Having witnessed the trauma of survivors, and read of the hundreds of millions who perished, including the majority of the natives of the Americas – who had developed no resistance to the disease since it was unknown on their continent before being introduced by Europeans in the 15th century – I find it hard to stomach anti-vaccination beliefs that have grown in recent years among people who have no idea how bad things were or could get.
Because India was among the last places from where smallpox was banished, I heard as a child of people getting Devi or Mata, as it was called. The Devi Mata in question was the smallpox goddess Shitala, a temple to whom is walking distance from my home in Mumbai. Since Shitala Devi focussed narrowly on producing and curing smallpox, she faced functional obsolescence after 1977. Her temple (anglicised to Sitladevi when directing taxicabs or purchasing bus tickets) still draws a trickle of devotees, but is entirely overshadowed by a shrine dedicated to Siddhivinayak that’s about the same distance from my home in the opposite direction. The Ganesha installed there had a profile more or less the equal of Shitala’s in days past, but has flourished even as her star waned. Siddhivinayak is obsolescence-proof, promising help with obstacles of all varieties, from illnesses to examinations to bad relations with in-laws.
As is well known, an Englishman named Edward Jenner produced the first vaccine against small pox at the end of the 18th century. Now, the science and technology minister in the Modi cabinet, a qualified doctor named Harsh Vardhan, has sought to rewrite history by claiming that we Indians knew about the smallpox vaccine all along. This is false, and classifiable as Raving Loony Hindutva History, which I’ve written about before. However, it is not false in the same manner as assertions that the Vedas contain formulae for building aircraft, spacecraft and nuclear weapons. Harsh Vardhan was half-correct when he said, “All of us know that Edward Jenner was the man who invented the vaccination for smallpox, but our Vedas will tell that the Hindus and Mohammedans of this country had done smallpox inoculations hundreds of years before the vaccine was invented.” He was right in pointing out that smallpox inoculations were carried out in India before Jenner’s invention. He was wrong in ascribing their origin to the Vedas.
Eastern origins
It is a well-established and uncontested fact that inoculation against smallpox was prevalent in China, India, West Asia, and parts of Africa long before it got to Europe. In every culture where it was practised, material from scabs or pustules taken from persons suffering from smallpox was transferred to healthy individuals, giving them a mild form of the disease while inducing their systems to produce antibodies that conferred immunity against further infection. This method, known as variolation, had three drawbacks. First, even minor infections left behind some disfigurement; second, there was a 1% to 2% mortality rate associated with the treatment; and third, inoculated individuals could pass on full-blown smallpox to those who came in contact with them.
Jenner’s insight was to recognise the importance of traditional English farm-hand knowledge that cowpox provided immunity against smallpox. He used benign cowpox-related material rather than deadly cells from smallpox sufferers in his “vaccination” (from vacca, Latin for cow). This eliminated mortality among patients as well as those in contact with them. Nothing like Jenner’s cowpox-based vaccination had ever been used in India or anywhere else, and it was a vital step in winning the war against one of the most gruesome and virulent diseases to afflict humans.
The history of that long war proves that there is no such thing as Western medicine, for innovations in Asia were important early steps in the development of the vaccine. It proves also that India was always home to empirical, secular traditions alongside spiritual ones. There is no mention whatsoever of variolation in any canonical Indian treatise. In fact, smallpox itself is not clearly described in any ancient Indian medical text. How and where variolation developed is difficult to ascertain. Perhaps it came to India from China, or perhaps it went to China from India, or perhaps it was developed independently in both regions. This paper by Rajesh Kochhar provides a good account of what is known of the history of inoculation and vaccination in India.
A relatively new disease
What surprises me is that both variolation and the worship of Shitala were concentrated in Bengal and to a lesser extent in North India. Shitala Devi herself is not an ancient goddess, appearing in the pantheon only in medieval times. In other words, a preventative treatment against smallpox, and a superstition about it, emerged more or less simultaneously in the same region. This could be a coincidence, but I can’t help wondering if they were causally related. Rajesh Kochhar quotes a report by J Shoolbred written in 1805, where the author says that inoculators, by treating only those who can afford it, leave the poor around them vulnerable, and “thus artificially produce an epidemic, which by its frequent recurrence, proves much more destructive to the community than if inoculation had been entirely abolished”.
It is possible that wealthy Indians got inoculated, while the poor, afflicted by an increase in the incidence of smallpox as a result of inoculation, turned increasingly to Shitala Mata for succour. A greater incidence of smallpox would have increased demand for variolation, which would increase the incidence of smallpox even further, and induce more people to worship the smallpox goddess. If, indeed, smallpox epidemics got much worse in medieval India, it might explain why Charaka and Susruta do not describe the disease in detail. All this is, of course, speculation.
Soon after Jenner’s vaccination technique became widely known, the British administration in India adopted it as the primary way to fight smallpox. Convincing the Indian public was another matter. In South India, where even variolation was not practiced, resistance was very great. In response, a civil servant in the Madras Presidency named Francis Whyte Ellis, who was a scholar of Tamil and Sanskrit, composed a Sanskrit tract that described vaccination in terms very close to Jenner’s method. He pretended that this was an ancient text providing canonical backing for vaccination. I don’t know how successful Ellis was in protecting locals from smallpox, but he unwittingly gave a gift to Loony Hindutva History’s claim that all knowledge originated in India.
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Because India was among the last places from where smallpox was banished, I heard as a child of people getting Devi or Mata, as it was called. The Devi Mata in question was the smallpox goddess Shitala, a temple to whom is walking distance from my home in Mumbai. Since Shitala Devi focussed narrowly on producing and curing smallpox, she faced functional obsolescence after 1977. Her temple (anglicised to Sitladevi when directing taxicabs or purchasing bus tickets) still draws a trickle of devotees, but is entirely overshadowed by a shrine dedicated to Siddhivinayak that’s about the same distance from my home in the opposite direction. The Ganesha installed there had a profile more or less the equal of Shitala’s in days past, but has flourished even as her star waned. Siddhivinayak is obsolescence-proof, promising help with obstacles of all varieties, from illnesses to examinations to bad relations with in-laws.
As is well known, an Englishman named Edward Jenner produced the first vaccine against small pox at the end of the 18th century. Now, the science and technology minister in the Modi cabinet, a qualified doctor named Harsh Vardhan, has sought to rewrite history by claiming that we Indians knew about the smallpox vaccine all along. This is false, and classifiable as Raving Loony Hindutva History, which I’ve written about before. However, it is not false in the same manner as assertions that the Vedas contain formulae for building aircraft, spacecraft and nuclear weapons. Harsh Vardhan was half-correct when he said, “All of us know that Edward Jenner was the man who invented the vaccination for smallpox, but our Vedas will tell that the Hindus and Mohammedans of this country had done smallpox inoculations hundreds of years before the vaccine was invented.” He was right in pointing out that smallpox inoculations were carried out in India before Jenner’s invention. He was wrong in ascribing their origin to the Vedas.
Eastern origins
It is a well-established and uncontested fact that inoculation against smallpox was prevalent in China, India, West Asia, and parts of Africa long before it got to Europe. In every culture where it was practised, material from scabs or pustules taken from persons suffering from smallpox was transferred to healthy individuals, giving them a mild form of the disease while inducing their systems to produce antibodies that conferred immunity against further infection. This method, known as variolation, had three drawbacks. First, even minor infections left behind some disfigurement; second, there was a 1% to 2% mortality rate associated with the treatment; and third, inoculated individuals could pass on full-blown smallpox to those who came in contact with them.
Jenner’s insight was to recognise the importance of traditional English farm-hand knowledge that cowpox provided immunity against smallpox. He used benign cowpox-related material rather than deadly cells from smallpox sufferers in his “vaccination” (from vacca, Latin for cow). This eliminated mortality among patients as well as those in contact with them. Nothing like Jenner’s cowpox-based vaccination had ever been used in India or anywhere else, and it was a vital step in winning the war against one of the most gruesome and virulent diseases to afflict humans.
The history of that long war proves that there is no such thing as Western medicine, for innovations in Asia were important early steps in the development of the vaccine. It proves also that India was always home to empirical, secular traditions alongside spiritual ones. There is no mention whatsoever of variolation in any canonical Indian treatise. In fact, smallpox itself is not clearly described in any ancient Indian medical text. How and where variolation developed is difficult to ascertain. Perhaps it came to India from China, or perhaps it went to China from India, or perhaps it was developed independently in both regions. This paper by Rajesh Kochhar provides a good account of what is known of the history of inoculation and vaccination in India.
A relatively new disease
What surprises me is that both variolation and the worship of Shitala were concentrated in Bengal and to a lesser extent in North India. Shitala Devi herself is not an ancient goddess, appearing in the pantheon only in medieval times. In other words, a preventative treatment against smallpox, and a superstition about it, emerged more or less simultaneously in the same region. This could be a coincidence, but I can’t help wondering if they were causally related. Rajesh Kochhar quotes a report by J Shoolbred written in 1805, where the author says that inoculators, by treating only those who can afford it, leave the poor around them vulnerable, and “thus artificially produce an epidemic, which by its frequent recurrence, proves much more destructive to the community than if inoculation had been entirely abolished”.
It is possible that wealthy Indians got inoculated, while the poor, afflicted by an increase in the incidence of smallpox as a result of inoculation, turned increasingly to Shitala Mata for succour. A greater incidence of smallpox would have increased demand for variolation, which would increase the incidence of smallpox even further, and induce more people to worship the smallpox goddess. If, indeed, smallpox epidemics got much worse in medieval India, it might explain why Charaka and Susruta do not describe the disease in detail. All this is, of course, speculation.
Soon after Jenner’s vaccination technique became widely known, the British administration in India adopted it as the primary way to fight smallpox. Convincing the Indian public was another matter. In South India, where even variolation was not practiced, resistance was very great. In response, a civil servant in the Madras Presidency named Francis Whyte Ellis, who was a scholar of Tamil and Sanskrit, composed a Sanskrit tract that described vaccination in terms very close to Jenner’s method. He pretended that this was an ancient text providing canonical backing for vaccination. I don’t know how successful Ellis was in protecting locals from smallpox, but he unwittingly gave a gift to Loony Hindutva History’s claim that all knowledge originated in India.