archaeology

For hundreds of years, the lost city of Angkor was itself a legend. Cambodian peasants living on the edge of the thick jungle around the Tonle Sap lake reported findings which puzzled the French colonialists who arrived in [Map] Indo-China in the 1860s. The peasants said they had found "temples built by gods or by giants." Their stories were casually dismissed as folktales by the pragmatic Europeans. Yet some did believe that there really was a lost city of a Cambodian empire which had once been powerful and wealthy, but had crumbled many years before.

Henri Mahout’s discovery of the Angkor temples in 1860 opened up this `lost city’ to the world. The legend became fact and a stream of explorers, historians and archaeologists came to Angkor to explain the meaning of these vast buildings. The earliest of these scholars could not believe that Angkor had been built by the Cambodian people, believing the temples to have been built by another race who had conquered and occupied Cambodia maybe 2,000 years before. Gradually, some of the mysteries were explained, the Sanskrit inscriptions deciphered and the history of Angkor slowly pieced together, mainly by French scholars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (more…)

Smallpox Today

Who would have thought that cows would bring the solution

The World Health Organisation began a campaign to eradicate smallpox 179 years after the epidemic in Gloucester; by 1977 the disease had disappeared, and in 1980 it was recommended, by the WHO, that vaccinations should be stopped and all laboratory stocks of the virus were destroyed. One of the world’s biggest killer diseases had been halted.

This leap from myth and folklore to medical miracle has saved the lives of thousands, and luckily Jenner preferred the rural life to that of a celebrity surgeon in London. By placing his trust in the folklore of his hometown he became a legend in his own right by turning myth into fact.

Jenner had noticed that when he was variolating people the majority of them showed signs, however mild, of the illness; milkmaids did not. The penny dropped for him when treating milkmaid Sarah Melmes, for small pox like marks which appeared on her hands, and on the udders of the cows she milked. Jenner reasoned that because she had been infected with vaccinia, or cow pox, which was harmless to humans, she was immune to the life threatening human strain.

Vaccines
Jenner coined the word vaccine from the Latin vacca for cow, and called the process vaccination.

Jenner went on to prove his hunch, by carrying out an early clinical trial on the eight-year-old son of his gardener, James Phipps. James was infected with cow pox, became mildly ill, then when well again, he was infected with smallpox, and showed no sign of illness whatsoever.

Jenner felt he had discovered a cure for his "Speckled Monster", but now he needed the rest of the world to know about it.

Old Wives Tales

Jenner was born and brought up in Berkely in Gloucestershire, among farming families. After qualifying, many of his patients were farmers, labourers, and milk maids. From this community, he heard of many old wives tales relating to the treatment and prevention of illness, most of which could never be proven when examined. One that did however was that milk maids were "fair of face, the prettiest girls in all the land".

Milkmaids’ skin would be infection free

This was no allusion to a genetic beauty only found in women who worked with cows, more that they were one of the only groups of women in society who were very rarely disfigured by smallpox scars.

Further local folklore told him that milk maids could never get the malady; they were "protected by some force of nature".

Upon examination of his patients during the 1788 epidemic, he saw there was some truth in the matter, even when whole families were struck down by the condition. If a daughter, wife or sister was a milkmaid she was very rarely affected by it. This local legend made Jenner think, and fostered one of medicine’s biggest breakthroughs ever.

Smallpox in the 18th and 19th Century

Edward Jenner’s first vaccination experiment was on James Phipps (8!) © Mary Evans Picture Library

Known by Jenner as the "Speckled Monster" smallpox was the biggest killer of it’s time. Affecting all sectors of society in the 18th Century, figures provided by the Jenner Museum show that, around 10% of the population would die from it and a further 20% would end up scarred, encouraging fashions of beauty spots and veils amongst the wealthy.

Smallpox and its disfiguring effect

From the 1700s onwards, with the advent of industrialisation and urbanisation, people lived in more cramped and unhygienic conditions, which allowed the virus, known as variola, to wipe out large swathes of the population; in 1844, in London, 8048 people died, according to medical records.

Smallpox was also used as a biological weapon by the British. In 1763, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, the Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in North America, wrote to Colonel Henry Bouquet: "Could it not be contrived to send smallpox among these disaffected tribes of Indians?" they did and it decimated the Native American population. (more…)