Name: ______Date: ______

When Plague Strikesby James Cross Giblin

Smallpox – Reading Guide

Chapter Six – The Mysterious Death of a Pharaoh

  1. What is a typical symptom of smallpox that Ramses V had?
  1. ______of smallpox victims, and even their ______or ______, can transmit the disease.
  1. What did the English historian, Thomas Babington Macaulay, call smallpox?
  1. What was smallpox caused by?
  1. How did victims acquire the virus?
  1. Describe the symptoms of smallpox?
  1. What name did smallpox originally go by?
  1. What would a person with smallpox have for the rest of their life?
  1. In addition to the skin, what did the virus often attack?
  1. What type of disease is smallpox?
  1. What is the name of the Indian smallpox goddess?
  1. Why did the Indian goddess attack children more often than adults?
  1. Who are the Huns?
  1. Why did Chinese children wear ugly paper masks to bed on the last night of the year?
  1. What two countries did smallpox sweep across during A.D. 580 and 581?
  1. Whose description of smallpox symptoms formed the basis of all medical texts dealing with the disease for the next 700 years?
  1. What treatment did England’s young Prince John receive for smallpox in 1314?
  1. What happened when the Crusaders returned home to Europe?
  1. If a person survived the disease, what would they be for life?
  1. Once smallpox entered a community, what did it never entirely do?
  1. Out of the 50,000 deaths before 1438, who were the majority of people to die?
  1. What did Christopher Columbus bring to the New World on his ship?

Chapter Seven – Smallpox Conquers the New World

  1. What group of people lived on the island of Hispaniola?
  1. How many Tainos were dead just 20 years after Christopher Columbus arrived?
  1. What was the name of the Spanish soldier and explorer that sailed from Cuba to Mexico with a band of 550 men in 1519?
  1. What two things did the Aztecs achieve a high degree of skill in?
  1. Why did the Aztecs and their emperor, Montezuma, receive the Spaniards with respect?
  1. How did Hernando Cortes take advantage of Montezuma?
  1. According to the priest from one of Narvaez’s ships, who was stricken with smallpox?
  1. Who did the infected African give smallpox to?
  1. How much of the population of Tenochtitlan did smallpox kill?
  1. “As the Indians did not know the remedy of the disease… they died in ______, like bedbugs. In many places it happened that ______in a house died and, as it was ______to bury the great number of dead, they pulled down the houses over them so that their ______became their ______.”
  1. After the battle, the Spanish found so many ______lying about the city – victims of ______, not the ______– that they claimed they could not ______through the streets without stepping on ______.
  2. What was the Incan emperor known as?
  1. When the emperor found out about the disease, who had already been killed?
  1. How many people do historians estimate died in Quito?
  1. What was the name of the new Spanish explorer who invaded the empire?
  1. “[The Incas] died by the scores and ______. Villages were ______. Corpses were ______over the fields or ______up in the houses or huts… The fields were ______; the herds were ______; and the workshops and mines were without ______... The price of food rose to such an extent that many persons found it ______their reach. They escaped the ______disease, only to be wasted by ______.”
  1. “Some of the Jesuits may have believed that it was better for Indians to be ______but ______than ______but ______and ______.”
  1. Who brought smallpox to North America?
  1. What did Increase Mather think the smallpox epidemic indicated?
  1. How many major smallpox epidemics did Boston withstand between 1636 and 1698?
  1. What prevention method did country people in Turkey use with great success?

Chapter Eight – Inoculation: Godsend or Danger?

  1. What did the Chinese doctors do to help people become immune to further attacks of the disease?
  2. What is the name of the similar form of immunization that country people in Eastern Europe practiced?
  1. What were the two strong personal reasons that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had for being concerned about smallpox?
  1. What did Lady Mary do to her five-year-old son in 1718 without her husband’s knowledge?
  1. What two groups of people did Princess Caroline test the inoculation procedure on before conducting it on her own children?
  1. Why did some religious people not want to be inoculated?
  1. Thanks to the efforts of Lady Mary and other supporters, what was happening by 1723?
  1. What method did Dr. Zabdiel Boylston use to inoculate patients?
  1. As in England, what fear did physicians express about patients who had been inoculated?
  1. Why did Mather’s son, Samuel, ask to be inoculated?
  1. Out of 280 patients who had been inoculated, what percentage died from the disease?
  1. Out of the 5,800 Bostonians that were not inoculated and caught smallpox, what percentage died from the disease?
  1. Who promoted inoculated in Philadelphia?
  1. What bill was passed to make inoculation available to the poor and the rich in 1774?
  1. Describe Sir Jeffrey Amherst’s “poisonous ‘gift’” to the Native Americans.
  1. Why did the American army have a bigger problem with smallpox than the British soldiers during the American Revolution?
  1. “I would fain ______that in a short space of time we shall have an ______not subject to this, the ______of all calamities that can ______it.”
  1. Did Washington’s inoculation policy work?
  1. Who were the majority of the victims of smallpox?
  1. In some English cities, such as Manchester and Birmingham, ______of every ______persons who died of smallpox were under ______years old.
  1. A French doctor in the late 1700s estimated that, despite the widespread use of inoculation, ______of the human race was still being ______, ______, or ______for life by smallpox.
  1. What was the new means of prevention that was about to be discovered that would bring the disease under control at last?

Chapter Nine – Dr. Jenner’s Marvelous Vaccine

  1. Who had a painful experience that he never forgot when he was 8 years old?
  1. Who took charge of Edward’s upbringing after his parents died?
  1. What did Stephen arrange for Edward to receive?
  1. How long did it take for Edward to fully recover from the smallpox inoculation?
  1. Why did farm people claim they couldn’t get smallpox?
  1. Describe cowpox.
  1. In 1773, what did Edward become?
  1. How did Sarah Nelmes get cowpox?
  1. What did Edward get permission to do on the eight-year-old boy, James Phipps?
  1. Why did James not have to be isolated after the cowpox inoculation (like people who receive the smallpox inoculation have to)?
  1. What inoculation did James Phipps receive on July 1 (AFTER the cowpox inoculation)?
  1. After receiving the cowpox inoculation and recovering AND receiving the smallpox inoculation, did the children need any time to recover from the smallpox inoculation?
  1. What did Edward call the matter he had taken from the cowpox sore?
  2. What does the word “vaccine” come from in Latin?
  1. In a letter to a colleague, he predicted that “the ______of smallpox – the most ______scourge of the human race – will be the ______result of [vaccination].”
  1. What 5 languages was Edward’s pamphlet translated into?
  1. A British surgeon named John Birch feared it would eliminate a disease that he called “a ______means of reducing the country’s ______population.”
  1. Why did some religious leaders oppose vaccination?
  1. Who did more than any other individual to spread the word about vaccination in the United States?
  1. Who were the first vaccinations performed on in the United States?
  1. “I had before attended to your publications on the subject in the newspapers, and took much ______in the result of the experiments you were making. Every friend of ______must look with ______on this discovery [vaccination], by which one more ______is withdrawn from the condition of ______.”
  1. Who said the above quote?
  1. Why did Native Americans not trust the vaccination?
  1. Why did the Native Americans’ suspicions have fatal consequences?
  1. Who accidentally triggered both epidemics?
  2. “Nobody thought of ______the dead. ______families together were left in horrid and loathsome ______in their own wigwams, with a few buffalo robes thrown over them, there to ______, and be ______by their own ______.”
  1. What goals of the young United States were furthered by the smallpox epidemics?
  1. What law did Massachusetts pass in 1855?
  1. England banned inoculation in ______and decreed in 1853 that all its citizens be ______instead.
  1. Not everyone was in favor of these new laws. Some saw them as example of government ______with matters that should be left to ______or ______choice. Others were simply ______of being vaccinated.
  1. What are the two parts of the law that Germany enacted?
  1. What might really bring about the annihilation of smallpox?

Chapter Ten – The End of Smallpox?

  1. What was the first country to report that smallpox had been wiped out within its borders?
  1. Name the 2 reasons why the United States moved more slowly to eradicate the disease.

100. Dr. C.V. Chapin, to state in 1913 that the United States was “the ______vaccinated of any ______country.”

101. What was the man who died from smallpox in Mexico City wrongly diagnosed with in March 1947?

102. How many New Yorkers had been vaccinated by April 20?

103. What two new advances in vaccination made ridding the entire world of smallpox seem possible?

104. What resolution did the WHO (World Health Organization) adopt in 1966?

105. Why did Dr. William Foege have to make do with a limited supply of vaccinations?

106. Where were the six countries that continued to have outbreaks of smallpox by the end of 1972?

107. Who was the Indian smallpox goddess?

108. What was the LAST east African country to eliminate smallpox (in 1977)?

109. What two people were infected with smallpox in September 1978?

110. What two people died from the incident in September 1978?

111. The results of its survey were in and the word was that smallpox – the disease that had killed ______of people over more than ______years – had been ______eliminated from the ______.

112. What did WHO recommend about vaccinations after their announcement?

113. Why did WHO and many member nations want the stocks of the smallpox virus to be destroyed?

114. What was the next deadly virus to capture the world’s attention?