Note: Respond To All Questions Below Prior to Jenner\'s experiments, how were th

Question

Note: Respond To All Questions Below

Prior to Jenner's experiments, how were the safety and efficacy of “variolation" tested? It was commonly recognized that people who contracted smallpox and who then recovered from it did not seem to ever get the disease again. This notion, that getting the disease once protected a person from ever getting it again, led to the idea of trying to prevent serious cases of the disease by deliberately infecting people with mild cases of it. That is, went this suggestion, if we could deliberately infect people with a mild case of smallpox when they were young, then if they healed from that mild case they would be protected against ever contracting another case of smallpox, mild or serious, in the future. This practice, called "buying the smallpox," "inoculation," or "yaiolation." was already a not uncommon folk practice in Turkey and on the European continent by the early 1700s, and had been practiced in China and Africa even earlier than that. It was, however, considered quite controversial. When Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British ambassador to Turkey, wanted to introduce the practice to the upper classes in her native England (in 1716), she wrote a lengthy letter to her countrymen urging the introduction of this new practice. She was also able to persuade the royal family to undertake a public, life-threatening medical experiment using as subjects som prisoners in Newgate jail, in order to test the safety of this new practice. She hoped that the medical establishment would then be persuaded of the safety and utility of the practice of variolation. She concludes her letter thus, after describing the variolation procedure in some detail: Every year thousands undergo this operation: and the French Ambassador says pleasantly that they take the small-pox here by way of diversion, as they take the waters in other countries. There is no example of anyone that had died in it [sic]; and you may believe I am well satisfied of the safety of this experiment, since I intend to try it on my dear little son. I am patriotenough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England Despite Lady Mary's anecdotal protestations to the contrary, many would later object to the procedure because there were no guarantees that variolatedpersons would survive the disease they had been given. Some did die of it. "A supposedly mild exposure to the disease in effect might not be so mild after all, and could kill or mutilate rather than simply immunize." As many as three or four persons per hundred did die of the procedure. Because of these grave misgivings about the practice, the royal experiment was undertaken, at the urging of Lady Mary, to test the safet purpose of the test, at first, was solely to determine the safety of the practice of variolation. This experiment, performed of course with no control group, offered the six prisoners their full freedom on the sole condition that they submit to the experiment of variolation. Thus, Three men and three women prisoners were inoculated on the morning of August 29, 1721, in front of twenty-five physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries, as well f the practice. This experiment involved testing variolation on six prisoners, three men and three women, in Newgate jail in 1721, and the to the royal word, were pardoned on September 6. This portion of the experiment had tested for safety only. Some people also wanted to kn efficacious. So, in order to test for efficacy, a Dr Charles Maitland arranged for one of the survivors of the Newgate inoculations, a nineteen-year- old woman, to come to a small town near London to act as the nurse and lie in the same bed every night with a ten-year-old smallpox victim. Fortunately, after six weeks of exposure, she still had not contracted the disease. These two experiments together were intended t o te t for both afety and efficacy, the two primary facts that researchers want to establish about any drug or vaccine. Whether the Newgate prisoner s another question. There were, after all, only six subjects - only five if we except the experiments actually proved what they intended to pro times as many subjects for that one-in-twenty-five mortality to be made evident. Nevertheless, the experiment did seem to provide some fairly variolated, and a few years after that, her four year old daughter, both with no resulting harmful complications. Lady Mary's efforts at introducing lready immune to smallpox. If the practice of variolation had a 4% the practice of variol ation t oEngland were in fact quit ssful, and by the middle of the 18th century the practice flourished. Unfortunat

Explanation / Answer

I can aswer that question in two ways

From the reading that comes along with the question:

From what I know I can tell you:

In those times it was not done, you could not systematically prove the safety and efficacy of variolation at that time everything was done by empiricism. Even at that time still had not been related to the microbes with diseases. As everything was done by empiricism, people saw that people who survived smallpox did not become sick of this. The survivors were left with horrible scars, from which they took "the spirit" of the attenuated disease to inoculate it and have the attenuated version of the disease. However, there was no evidence of hygiene, safety or efficacy at that time, so that if the person had some other disease (such as leishmaniasis) there was a probability that they acquired this disease instead of only attenuated smallpox. Another fact is that at that time there were people with lower immunodeficiencies so if they had a "clean" inoculum of attenuated smallpox instead of developing attenuated disease they suffered from the deadly disease.

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse N
• Subjects

---

---

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.