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Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin
Inoculation is not the same - remotely - as the germ theory of disease. It was practical, cause-and effect medical treatment, like the use of willow bark and quinine - and answered no questions as to how diseases are transmitted. Germs would have to wait for Louis Pasteur.
(It's worth pointing out that Lady Worley and Mather were working during the first quarter of the 18th century, still the era of the Genuine Enlightenment).
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Certainly microbial pathogens were not "discovered" until the Victorian Age, but they did not discover these in a vacuum. The previous work of van Leeuwenhoek (commonly known as the "Father of Microbiology", who first reported characteristics of bacteria), Robert Hooke, and Spallanzani (who proposed that microbes move through the air and that they could be killed through boiling) were all men of the 18th century.
The "Genuine Enlightenment" has been a period that historians have marked as ending in 1789 (the French Revolution) and even 1804 (the Napoleonic Wars), what is your personal preference? Because I have yet to see any dates cast in stone.
Quote:
Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin
I would also dispute "the East always being way ahead of the West at the time"
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As far as the use of inoculations (variolations), China is said to have practiced it since the 10th century, and, certainly from a scientific standpoint, I would say the Chinese and the Muslims were far ahead of the West prior to the Enlightenment, or at least the late Renaissance. I don't even think the point is debatable.
But I was trying to make a general point, not bicker about arbitrary dates of epochs that historians do not necessarily agree upon, and whether or not the "smallpox blankets" were effective is besides the point. The effort was made, at least twice; thus, an idea, however misconstrued, of biological warfare.
And the actual use of biological war dates back at the very least to the Black Death (most likely much earlier, but my study has been the Late Middle Ages), when Gabriele de' Mussi reported (a very detailed account much prized by Medievalists for its thoroughness) the Tartars had catapulted plague victims into the besieged town of Caffa in 1346:
“The dying Tartars, stunned and stupefied by the immensity of the disaster brought about by the disease, and realizing that they had no hope of escape, lost interest in the siege. But they ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in the hope that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside. What seemed like mountains of dead were thrown into the city, and the Christians could not hide or flee or escape from them, although they dumped as many of the bodies as they could in the sea. And soon the rotting corpses tainted the air and poisoned the water supply, and the stench was so overwhelming that hardly one in several thousand was in a position to flee the remains of the Tartar army. Moreover one infected man could carry the poison to others, and infect people and places with the disease by look alone. No one knew, or could discover, a means of defense."
They, of course, didn't know the nature of the disease, but knew what the effect could be, in much the same way as English longbowmen of the 13th and 14th century never drew arrows from a quiver, but rather stuck the arrows in the ground in front of them during battle. This served two purposes: 1) they could nock their arrows faster, and 2) the dirt on the arrow heads would make wounds much more likely to fester.