Superintendents Corner Healthcare for children is common sense

The French philosopher Voltaire wrote a series of letters in the 1830s commenting on several ways that the English were sensibly addressing issues of the age, one of which was smallpox. The English had been exposing infants to small doses of the disease in order to prevent massive outbreaks and catastrophic loss of life. While the French generally considered the English to be fools and madmen for giving their children smallpox to keep them from having it, Voltaire presented compelling statistics to defend the practice He claimed that 60% of the population was exposed to smallpox in the 18th century and that a fifth of the population was “killed or disfigured by the disease. However, of all those who are inoculated in England, not a one dies, unless he is infirm and condemned to death in other respects; no one is marked with it; no one gets smallpox a second time.