(photo)
Lancet with a steel blade that folds into the
tortoiseshell handle, used by doctors to
administer smallpox vaccinations
Smallpox thrived in dirty conditions and
affected
soldiers and civilians alike. Prisoners
of war on
both sides died of
the disease. Many poor blacks living in
dirty
refugee camps on the outskirts of
Washington, D.C.,
also perished of
smallpox. Their clothes were often sold
to
secondhand shops, thereby spreading the
virus, which
could live in the
clothes for 18 months.
The Confederate army saw their first
cases of
smallpox after contact with Yankees at
Sharpsburg.
With an outbreak
threatening their army, all
Confederates were
ordered to be vaccinated. Doctors went
out and
vaccinated healthy
children and then used the scabs to
make more
vaccines for their soldiers. Many
soldiers, not
willing to wait for
the doctors, vaccinated one another
using dirty
pocketknives and scabs from fellow
soldiers. Their
contaminated,
large cuts often resulted in nasty
infections.
Smallpox was more feared than the
enemies
bullets. When the Civil War began,
vaccines that
used human scabs as
their source were an unperfected new
product. The
procedure for administering the vaccine
was itself
so crude that it
often created problems. Each man would
wait in line
for a doctor to cut his arm three or
four times with
a knife,
then put a little of the vaccine into
the wounds.
The doctors "wholesale slashing and
cutting of arms"
gave the men
sore arms for 10 days.