The Scourge of Smallpox in Early Modern England by Deborah Swift

Unbearable Pain

We are fortunate to live in an age where smallpox has practically been eradicated. In the eras when my novels are set, this disease struck indisciminately, both rich and poor alike. Researching the plague, I have read a lot about smallpox epidemics in my research. Although we often hear of the plague in the 17th century, smallpox killed more people and was just as deadly.

If you caught smallpox you would begin by suffering a high fever, along with vomiting, and severe stomach pains. This would often be followed by delirium and a red rash which started on the arms and legs and then spread to the face. The pox proper - pustules filled with liquid, usually appeared after about six days, beginning on the forehead and wrists and spreading into the mouth and throat.

A case from 1886

Unlike chickenpox, smallpox affected the palms of the hands and soles of the feet, which made touching anything unbearably painful. If there was no-one to look after you, you were likely to die of starvation or dehydration. If that weren't bad enough, smallpox brought other complications in its wake - bronchial infections, ear infections, gangrene, and even paralysis. No wonder the disease was so feared.

A Colonal Treatise on smallpox

Smallpox Scars
Probably the most famous smallpox sufferer was Elizabeth I, who covered the resulting pitting with her now trademark white lead. As a queen, her power was such that it did not affect her fortune, but in an age where a woman's trade was her looks, catching smallpox could change lives forever. Those who survived an attack were often severely pockmarked, and to counter this effect, women wore veils, masks or patches (beauty spots) to hide the worst of them.

Hannah Woolley in her book 'The Accomplish't Lady's Delight' advises a 'lemon and sea salt wash', whereas the physician William Salmon (1695) recommends bacon dripping scented with rosewater to soothe pitted skin.

Scars were a mild discomfort, for death from the disease was common and in the 17th Century John Evelyn records in his diary how his daughter, Mary, suffered and eventually died at the age of 19, causing him 'unspeakable sorrow and Affliction.' 

Woman at Toilet - Gilles Petit, showing patches

The effect of the virus grew during the 16th century but reached epidemic proportions by the early 17th century. At most risk were those in the capital, where crowded conditions made the spread of the disease easy, and the epidemic of 1694-1695 killed Queen Mary.

Causes and Cures
John Aubrey writes that;

'the small-pox is usually in all great towns...at one of them every seventh year and at the other every ninth year...which the physicians cannot master.'

Like many, he believed the disease to be cyclical, and to be caused by infected air. Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689), a physician, noticed that the rich seemed to die more often from smallpox than the poor. His conclusion was that the treatments killed as many as they cured. Though I have to say, his own methods seemed extreme; here is  a patient's description:

“Whilst I lived in Dr Sydenham’s house, I had myself the Small Pox, and fell ill on the Twelfth Day. In the beginning I lost twenty two Ounces of Blood [from bloodletting]. He gave me a Vomit, but I find by Experience Purging much better. I went abroad, by his Direction, till I was blind, and then took to my Bed. I had no Fire allowed in my Room, my Windows were constantly open, my Bed-Clothes were ordered to be laid no higher than my Waste. He made me take twelve Bottles of Small Beer, acidulated with Spirit of Vitriol, every twenty Four hours. I had of this Anomalous Kind [of smallpox] to a very great Degree, yet never lost my Senses one Moment.” 

Thomas Dover, The Ancient Physician’s Legacy to His Country

A Old Crypt Causes Fear of Infection

The excavation of the crypt of Spitalfields church in London in 1985 raised the genuine possibility of re-introduction. The bodies - three thousand of them, preserved in lead-lined coffins, were from the 18th and early 19th centuries, and about 10% were known to have died of smallpox. The Victoria & Albert Museum staff used medical precautions when dealing with them, as it is not known how long the organism can survive.

Thread Inoculation

A Norwegian vicar in about 1700 reported that people “bought pox”  to ensure a mild attack. They rubbed a coin on open smallpox sores, then made a thin cut in the skin of healthy children and tied  the coin tightly to the wound; this acted as primitive immunisation.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) hit upon the same idea and is credited with introducing variolation or 'ingrafting' to Britain in 1721. Severely pockmarked herself, after surviving the illness from which her brother died, she learnt about variolation in Constantinople, where her husband was the British Ambassador. 

Ingrafting consists of taking a small amount of infectious matter from a sufferer and using a thread, introducing it to a small cut. After that, the wound would be bandaged and a mild case of small pox would ensue. This prevented a more severe infection. Lady Montagu, who lost her eyelashes completely to the disease, had her children inoculated and persuaded the Princess Caroline to do the same, thus earning a Royal seal of approval.

In 1796 the idea was developed further by Edward Jenner, widely credited with being the instigator of immunology. He noticed that milkmaids, who often contracted cowpox, were immune to smallpox.

Jenner infects his gardeners son

So he infected James Phipps, the son of his gardener, with cowpox from Sarah Nelmes, a milkmaid who had caught the infection from a cow called Blossom. The boy was then exposed to smallpox and did not contract the disease. Somewhat risky - I don't think I would have been prepared to risk it for my child! But thank goodness he did, for the deadly and disfiguring disease is now a terror of the past.

Sources: 

Maladies and Medicine -Jennifer Evans and Sara Read

US National Library of Medicine

Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism - Sheldon J. Watts

Images from wikipedia

Coming Soon from Deborah: A Plague on Mr Pepys

Find me on Twitter @swiftstory

Beauty and the Buerk, by H.M. Castor

Michael Buerk (a BBC broadcaster and former newsreader) has made me very cross indeed this week. He has said that television presenters who “got a job mainly because [they] look nice” should not 'cry ageism' and complain when they are sacked to make way for younger replacements. Though he hasn't mentioned the gender of the presenters he's talking about, he has said that some of them have "even" gone to tribunals over the issue, so there's no doubt about it: he's talking about women.

Grey-haired father of two Buerk (68) does not seem to realise the bind that women are in. They will not be employed as presenters or newsreaders unless they do look “nice”. Regardless of whether they have top degrees, speak several languages and have considerable political, editorial and journalistic experience, there will be plenty of people – like Buerk, presumably – who cannot see past the issue of physical appearance. It is then doubly maddeningly infuriating (yes, I am cross – did I mention that?) when those same people repackage their own short-sightedness as a shortcoming of the women themselves, dismissing a highly skilled, talented and experienced female as “just a pretty face”.

I thought of this trap – damned if you’re deemed ‘pretty’, damned if you’re not (and either way it’s the most important thing about you!) – when looking recently at this marvellous 16^th-century woodcut of a Venetian woman lightening her hair.

It’s from Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni, which was published in Venice in 1590 (and is now available in a beautiful English edition, translated by Margaret F. Rosenthal and Ann Rosalind Jones, under the title The Clothing of the Renaissance World).

The picture shows a young woman sitting in a rooftop loggia, sunning her hair (but, crucially, not her face) with the help of a straw hat from which the crown has been cut out. The hat has a broad brim, across which the woman’s hair is draped. Vecellio's text tells us that women like this “keep their heads exposed to the sun for days at a time” in order to make their hair turn blonde:

[T]hey sit [outside] when the sun is hottest and wet their hair with a little sponge attached to a wooden handle and soaked in a liquid that they buy or make at home themselves; and over and over again, as they wet their hair, they let it dry in the sun, and in this way they turn their hair blonde so effectively that we think it is natural.

I’m not sure how Michael Buerk would feel about spending his days like this, but I imagine it must have been a tedious and, in the heat, quite possibly fairly uncomfortable way for a young woman to pass her time. Why would she do it?

For a clue, let us turn to Agnolo Firenzuola’s Dialogo delle Bellezze delle Donne (Dialogue On the Beauty of Women), 1548. “The hair… should be fine and fair,” he says, “in the similitude now of gold, now of honey, and now of the bright and shining rays of the sun…”

A bit like this, then. I wonder how many hours in the loggia these streaks took…

Young Woman with a Fan c. 1555

(possibly Titian’s daughter Lavinia)

by Titian, who was Cesare Vecellio’s cousin

[Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

In Vecellio’s discussion of hair-lightening, the fact that women are trapped by society’s requirement that they must be beautiful is not acknowledged. Vecellio, it seems, is as blind to this as Michael Buerk. His text accompanying the woodcut instead blames women for their efforts to conform to contemporary ideas of beauty:

[A]ll women desire to increase their natural beauty through art, and the women of Venice are no different in their eagerness to do this. In doing so, however, they harm more than help themselves… [W]hen other people recognize the effort they have put into this, they mistrust even the woman’s natural beauty and judge it as artificial.

It’s a very neat Catch-22 situation. Hair dyeing is associated with vanity and a lack of ‘real’ beauty. (The Roman poet Propertius wrote, “All beauty is best as nature made it… In hell below may many an ill befall that girl who stupidly dyes her hair with a false colour!”) ‘Real’ beauty is natural… but definitions of female beauty are prescriptive and limited. Women cannot escape being judged on their looks, and yet they are criticised for making efforts to conform to the ideal.

At the bottom of this tangled prejudice lies the age-old association of the female with matter and the body, which (despite the idealisation of beauty) has long been considered fundamentally inferior to spirit (associated with the male). Jacqueline Murray, in an article on Firenzuola’s On the Beauty of Women, explains it thus:

Philosophers since the time of Plato associated women with the body and the material world, both inferior to the soul and the spiritual world. Thus women are evaluated as inferior within a framework of body-soul dualism. This is particularly significant when analysing treatises praising women in general and acclaiming women’s physical beauty in particular…

This anti-body prejudice is embedded deep within our culture, and needs examining in itself every bit as urgently as the continuing gender double standard with which it is associated. It makes the fact that beauty is more important for women than it is for men – a fact stated by Baldassare Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier (1528) – doubly unfair. Because it means that not only are women judged on an arbitrary, superficial and (in most cases) irrelevant standard, but also that when they meet that standard, when they are deemed beautiful – as Michael Buerk implied (2014) – it turns out they aren't worth much after all.

Georgian Beauty Remedies

by Marie-Louise Jensen


I'm not adverse to a few moisturisers and beauty treatments from time to time, but I can be quite lazy about anything that takes much effort.
I was looking through my copy of Eliza Smith's The Compleat Housewife (first published in 1758 and invaluable for describing food in Georgian books) the other day and came across the various beauty remedies towards the back of the volume. I fear if I'd lived in Georgian times, I'd have lacked the motivation to try for any semblance of beauty at all.
A Remedy for Pimples runs thus:
"Take a quarter of a pound of bitter almonds, blanch, stamp them, and put them into half a pint of spring water; stir it together, strain it out; then put it to half a pint of the best brandy, and a pennorth of the flour of brimstone; shake it well when you use it, which must be often; dab it on with a fine rag."
Honestly, I'd rather be spotty. And who could afford those ingredients?
To Whiten and Clean the Hands, Smith suggests the following recipe:
"Boil a quart of new milk, and turn it with a pint of aqua-vitae; and take off the curd; then put into the posset a pint of rhenish wine, and that will raise another curd, which take off; then put in the whites of six eggs well beaten, and that will raise another curd, which you must take off, and mix the three curds together very well, and put them into a gallipot and put the posset in a bottle; scour your hands with the curd, and wash them with the posset."
Next time I read in an old book that a character brews a posset, I will have a lot more respect for the time it would take! I definitely would have been spotty AND lacking white hands!
And I think, looking at Smith's remedy for scurvy of the gums, her readers would have done better to have ignored the long, time-consuming recipe for a gargle and just eaten the six oranges she recommended putting in it.
The cure for breast cancer could come in handy one day though; apparently if you collect the warts from a stone horse and powder them, you can also brew something as a cure with them. Hmm. I suspect you'd be more likely to be trampled to death by the stallion if you tried scraping his warts off than cured of cancer.