In this newsletter, I have summarised an idea from the Becoming A Better Ancestor Project.

History is full of examples where we were wrong about what caused a disease.

• Schizophrenia was blamed on bad mothering
• Tuberculosis was blamed on bad air
• HIV/Aids was blamed on immorality

The first lesson from the smallpox eradication is this: If we can understand what causes something we can change it.

It sounds obvious, but as Bill Foege says:

“If you think that everyone believes this is a cause-and-effect world, just look at how many people check their horoscope”

Smallpox was one of the world's deadliest diseases

• In Europe alone, researchers think smallpox killed 60 million people in the 18th century alone
• In the 20th century, it killed over 300 million people
• But in the 1980s smallpox became the first disease to be eradicated.

Here’s the story:

In the 18th century, smallpox killed millions. It killed 1 out of every 3 people and left millions scarred for life.

Many famous people got smallpox including, Mozart, Queen Elizabeth I of England and Abraham Lincoln

We had no clue what caused smallpox (some thought it was a punishment from God) or how to treat it. So, some of the treatments were pretty random. They were things like:

• Bloodletting
• Inducting of vomiting
• Enemas

But everything changed when we started to understand the cause and effect of smallpox