Smallpox, despite its savage effects, is a disease of civilization. It could hardly
be otherwise. A virus that has only human hosts, that produces an acute disease of
relatively short duration and leaves behind among the living only individuals with
robust immunity and no chronic carriers could hardly have survived until large settled
human communities appeared after the invention of horticulture and the domestication
of animals. These altered conditions for human life probably permitted a pox virus
of herd animals to find human beings a suitable host and to move from host to host
in a timely fashion.
The slim evidence that we possess from early human history, three Egyptian mummies
showing suspicious eruptions of the skin and the more ambiguous testimony of early
texts describing disease outbreaks, is consistent with this theory and suggests that
smallpox spread from Egypt and Mesopotamia to India and China. We do know with much
greater certainty that smallpox was endemic in all of these ancient cradles of civilization
by the second century AD.
2
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Article info
Publication history
Accepted:
May 15,
2003
Received in revised form:
April 21,
2003
Received:
April 14,
2003
Identification
Copyright
© 2003 Mosby, Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
