The Revolutionary Warantine
Warantine isn’t a word. It’s a lame portmanteau I just made up about a quarantine that happened during the American Revolutionary War. I was motivated to write this because of a righteous Twitter burn.
Jim Jordan is a congress critter and a piece of shit representing Ohio. He used to be a wrestling coach at Ohio State University, and six of his former athletes alleged that he knew the school physician was sexually abusing them, yet he did nothing. Big surprise, the piece of shit is a hardcore Trumpanzee.
On December 29 of last year, piece of shit Jim Jordan made this dumbass piece of shit tweet:
60 million Americans are subject to a stay at home order or curfew.
11 million are right here in Ohio.
What would the Founders say?
And then Kevin Kruse, a professor of American history at Princeton University, retweeted piece of shit Jim with this added commentary:
There was a massive smallpox epidemic during the American Revolution.
George Washington quarantined the infected, refused to let people from hot spots travel to his army, and even sent a thousand soldiers to Boston to prevent the spread there.
In conclusion, Jim Jordan is a piece of shit, and Kevin Kruse is awesome. I highly recommend following Kruse. Not Jim though. Fuck that guy.
Except I don’t want to conclude it there. I may know a lot about history, but there is a LOT of history, and so there is way more that I don’t know. And I didn’t know about the smallpox outbreak during the war. So, I wanted to learn some more about it then add some swear words to it and write it up for you. Here you go.
I wrote about the first smallpox vaccine, which was the first ever vaccine, for the “Shit Went Down” column last May. It came more than a dozen years after the end of the American Revolution, so it was too late to help them, but they did have the crude method of variolation that I discussed in that piece, which was of some help. I’ll get to that.
Here is the thing about being in the Army: it’s kind of crowded. And especially back in the 18th century, hygiene was not the best. People were constantly on top of each other, sleeping and eating and shitting together, and such circumstances allow for a disease such as smallpox to spread like, well, like fucking smallpox.
If you didn’t read that previous link, I want to give you a bit of context about just how nasty this shit was. Again, the vaccine was first created in 1796. At the beginning of the 20th century, more than a hundred years later, the disease was still killing a metric shit ton of people. It was finally wiped out in 1975, but between 1900 and when it was finally eradicated three-quarters of a century later, it stillmanaged to waste 300 million people. Almost a third of a billion people dead, long after the vaccine was invented. Smallpox was a motherfucker.
And George Washington took that shit seriously. Growing up in the age prior to vaccines and without the best access to clean water and people not having flush toilets or believing in hand washing, George and members of his family had suffered through many illnesses, so he knew the destructive power of disease. He had a war to win, and to defeat the British he also needed to defeat smallpox.
Beginning in 1775, the outbreak wasn’t limited to a small area, but pretty much the entire North American continent, from Mexico to Alaska. With its 30% death rate, there was lots of, well, death, especially among Native Americans.
George knew smallpox wasn’t fucking around, so he wasn’t going to fuck around either. Unlike the 45th president of the United States, the first one took pandemics seriously. He’d seen not just how smallpox would rip through the cramped and dirty conditions of an armed encampment, but how diphtheria, malaria, and scarlet fever would do the same.
He got really uptight about anyone showing the slightest symptoms, putting them in quarantine. There were even times that he had his Continental Army retreat not for military reasons, but to flee an outbreak of smallpox. And to show just how much George wasn’t fucking around, he implemented the crude method of variolation, which was to give people a very small dose of smallpox. It worked quite well at preventing infection, if you survived it. Variolation had a death rate of about 2%. Conversely, smallpox killed 30% of those infected, and those who survived it could be pretty fucked up, even blinded.
One thing about Kruse’s tweet regarding the troops Washington sent to Boston to prevent the spread: The troops chosen had already had smallpox and were known to be immune. Smart thinking, George.
Realizing that quarantine and sanitation were not enough because smallpox was still killing his troops, Washington made the tough call that it was better to kill 2% by having his troops inoculated via variolation to protect the other 98% than to risk losing a third of them. Washington himself was a survivor of smallpox, so needed no such inoculation, but his wife Martha got it, and then it was mass implemented throughout his army. And yes, men died from the variolation, but many more lived as a result of it.
The British troops had been doing variolation for a while, not to mention that many were immune from having smallpox as children when the disease ripped through Europe. It is believed that if Washington had not taken the tough position he had, his army may have been defeated.
The massive program of inoculation of the Continental Army paved the way for the development of America’s public health system that later would be responsible for the control and eradication of many diseases, including polio, diphtheria, and measles.