I'm reading Jeffrey Kacirk's delightful Forgotten English, which includes this anecdote concerning boanthropy, a condition where a person believes himself to be a cow or ox:
In 1792, Edward Jenner successfully developed a vaccine for smallpox by injecting a boy with closely related cowpox germs. He did this despite his medical critics' attempts to scuttle his project by circulating boanthropy scare-stores. The critics alleged that those inoculated would develop bovine appetites, make cowlike sounds, and go about on four legs butting people with their horns...
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It's time for this year's second installment of student guest posts for my class on infectious causes of chronic disease. First one this year is by Dana Lowry.
Humans have a long history of illness and death from infectious diseases. It wasn’t until the 1790s that we had a solution. Edward Jenner…
The control and eventual eradication of the smallpox virus from the wild is one of the most heralded success stories in all of public health. Indeed, smallpox has played a central role in the history of vaccination. Even prior to Edward Jenner's use of the related cowpox virus to protect…
The word "vaccine" comes from the Latin word for cow (vacca), as many people know. Infecting people with cowpox (whose medical name is now vaccinia) cross protected them against smallpox, a piece of folk knowledge exploited by Jenner in 1796, when he introduced the practice of inoculating people…
Vaccine reactions are almost inevitable, and even when rare, if you are vaccinating hundreds of thousands or millions or tens of millions, you get them. Some are worse than others, and generalized vaccinia from a smallpox vaccination is one of the worst. Vaccinia is cowpox, not smallpox, but since…
Sssshhhh!, don't give the anti-vax nuts any more ideas! Next thing you know they'll be screeching about "the Boanthropy risk" too.