Posts Tagged ‘cowpox’
Mary Wortley Montagu and early immunology
Mary Wortley Montagu, aristocrat, writer, poet, traveller and advocate of variolation
The person I live with recently had a women’s lunch in which the Covid pandemic came up for discussion. One of the women, whom I know to be a white South African by origin, and a Christian (all of which may be irrelevant), said ‘Well I didn’t get Covid, because I wasn’t vaccinated’. Apparently everyone present politely ignored this remark, but it was obviously sufficiently egregious for Sarah to mention it to me afterwards.
The only other thing I know about this woman, whom I’ve met a few times, is that she’s very much an advocate for ‘organic’ produce, and so opposed to GMOs, a topic about which I’ve written in the now-distant past, but which has often come up in SGU podcasts, perhaps most recently in episode 1024’s ‘science or fiction’ segment, in which it was pointed out that the US produces and consumes far more GM food than any other nation, even though, typically for such a divided nation, it protests more vehemently that any other country about the whole GM thing.
Anyway, this woman remarked that she (and so presumably everyone else who survived) didn’t get Covid because she wasn’t vaccinated. So, since ‘because’ is clearly a causal word, in basic logic, she is saying that the vaccine caused Covid. That’s to say the pandemic was caused by immunologists and their vaccines. Ergo, immunologists have slaughtered over 7 million people. The virus itself, presumably, doesn’t exist.
It’s hard to know where to begin with such people, but let’s just kindly say that they can’t think straight. In any case, it reminded me of all the efforts I made to understand the virus, its mode of action, the ACE2 receptor, the ‘cytokine storm’ and so forth, much of which I’ve already forgotten.
And yet…
I often come back to the immune system and its incalculable intricacies, because… well, just because. It’s just fascinating. As are our historical attempts to understand it and manipulate it to our benefit.
So I’ve begun to watch a set of lectures on immunology from MIT, delivered in 2018 – just in time to ready all those students for the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak! The first lecture began with the story of Edward Jenner, cowpox and the first vaccination, back in 1796, and I hadn’t made the connection between vaccine and vacca, the Latin word for cow, and of course vache in French. Silly me. But, even more interesting, on recounting this to my closest friend, she reminded me… who was that aristocrat, Lady Mary Whatsername, who was really the first…
So in the interests of feminist fairness and all, here’s her story.
In 1721, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu brought smallpox inoculation to Europe, by asking that her two daughters be inoculated against smallpox as she had observed practice in Turkey.
That’s from the WHO Brief History of Vaccines, referenced below. But as you can see from that site, it didn’t start with Lady Mary. Variolation, from ‘la variole’, a name for smallpox, goes back many centuries, and involves exposing people to ‘mild’ doses of smallpox to confer immunity. I’m not sure of the ‘how’ of that process – apparently one method was blowing old smallpox scabs into people’s noses, causing them to contract a mild form of the disease. I mean, what could go wrong?
In any case, as with Jenner decades later, this was clever thinking about the inducing of immunity, long before anything much was known about our super-complex two-pronged immune system.
So all of this is introductory to another attempt to get my head around that system, via the glorious magic of the internet. Who needs to pay for a university education nowadays? Well, I suppose I’m lucky I got to learn the world’s biggest international language from babyhood.
So I’ll start my dive into the deeps of our extraordinary immune system in my next post.
References
https://www.sgutranscripts.org/wiki/SGU_Episode_1024