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  • 2018-06-13 (xsd:date)
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  • Does This Photograph Show Two Boys — One Vaccinated, One Not — Who Were Exposed to Smallpox? (en)
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  • The importance of the smallpox vaccination tends to go unnoticed in modern society, as the disease was officially eradicated by the 1980s. But Internet users were reminded of this terrible disease, the medicine that helped eliminated it, and the utility of vaccinations in general in June 2018, when a shocking photograph purportedly showing two children who had been exposed to the same smallpox source was posted to Reddit: This is a genuine photograph that was taken in the early 1900s by Dr. Allan Warner of the Isolation Hospital at Leicester in the UK. Warner photographed a number of smallpox patients in order to study the disease. In 1906, the Scottish Medical and Surgical Journal noted the importance of Warner's work: The medical journal here is referring to a series of photographs by Warner that were published in the Atlas of Clinical Medicine, Surgery, and Pathology a few years previously, in 1901. This particular photograph was originally accompanied by a caption which stated that both children were 13 years old, that they had both been infected by the same smallpox source on the same day, but that only one had received a vaccination in infancy: More photographs of this nature can also be found in this volume. For instance, the following photograph shows two sisters aged 21 and 15 who were exposed to the same source of smallpox on the same day. Again, only one of the sisters had received a vaccination: A vaccination for smallpox was developed by an English doctor named Edward Jenner in the late 1700s. It would eventually lead to the eradication of smallpox, but in the 1700s as in the first decades of the 21st century, physicians faced opposition from anti-vaccination groups. Professor Gareth Williams, chair of the Jenner Trust, used Warner's photographs during a presentation at Gresham University about the history of the anti-vaccination movement. According to Williams, the parents of the boy on the left in the viral image were swept up by anti-vaccination fervor when they decided not to inoculate their child: (en)
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