By Shelby Mattice, Bronck Museum Curator
In the fall of 1662 Jeremias Van Rensselaer at Beverwijck (Albany) wrote his mother in Holland that his newlywed 17 year old wife Maria Van Cortlandt had contracted smallpox which was ravaging the community. Jeremias described his wife’s condition as being “… so that one can still notice it by looking at her …” he was, of course, referring to the presence of the pus filled sores called pocks that characterized the disease. Smallpox had a bag of nasty symptoms the most serious of which was a fatality rate approaching 30%. The disease which spread rapidly was most dangerous to children sometimes 9 out of 10 smallpox deaths were children under the age of ten. Adults and teenagers like Maria also caught the disease. Many survivors were disfigured for life, one third suffered permanent blindness and some like Maria were left crippled as the result of a secondary bacterial infection of a smallpox lesion that appears to have led to bone infection and damage to her right leg. She would have to use both a cane and a crutch throughout much of her adult life.
Smallpox is a respiratory disease spread by droplets or contact with contaminated objects. Symptoms included high fever, headache, chills, and vomiting about four days after the first symptoms appeared a rash broke out on the face. The first pocks appeared inside the mouth, throat and nose before spreading to the skin surface as raised pus filled sores on the face, soles of the feet, palms of the hands, forearms, neck and back. In severe cases the pocks ran together into a single oozing stinking mass. Scabbing began about 10 days after the pocks appeared. Smallpox was contagious until the scabs fell off approximately four weeks after the disease was contracted. Death resulted from blood clots and septic shock. There was no effective medical treatment. Sanitary precautions and quarantine of those infected offered the only way to manage the spread of this highly contagious disease. Smallpox has been around for millennia. Egyptian mummies have been discovered with smallpox lesions. The disease was a recurring part of life Europe for centuries. Most Europeans had experienced the disease and those that survived developed immunity. The first Europeans to settle in America very likely benefited from immunity acquired in Europe but the same was not true for their American born children or grandchildren, like Maria Van Rensselaer.
The first recorded outbreak of smallpox among European settlers in America broke out in 1633 at Plymouth Massachusetts. By 1647 ships arriving in the colonies were quarantined if smallpox was suspected among the crew. In the first few years of the 1700s laws were written that codified the legal requirements for imposing both maritime and land quarantines. During the 1700s the American colonies experienced seven smallpox epidemics the worst of these struck Boston during the winter and spring of 1721-1722. Surviving records indicate that the population of the town at that time was around 11,000 approximately 6,000 caught the disease, an infection rate of over 50%. A decade later during the fall and winter of 1731-1732 both Albany and New York City suffered an outbreak of smallpox. Dutch Church records at Albany indicate seventy burials during this time. Among those lost were two of the eight children of Catharina and Leendert Gansevoort. Thirteen year old Sara and her infant sister Agnietie, nieces of Leendert Bronck builder of the 1738 brick house on the Bronck farmstead, succumbed to the disease in late December 1731. The collections of the Albany Institute of History and Art include Nehemiah Partridge’s portrait of a surprisingly mature 2 year old Sara Gansevoort in a pretty red gown holding a rose in one hand and a tame bird perching on a finger in her other hand.
By the 1700s a form of smallpox inoculation called variolation was in use as a folk remedy in Europe. Variolation in this period could be accomplished in two ways. A tiny cut was made in the skin of a healthy person and a small amount of fresh smallpox pus was introduced into the cut, alternately the dried scabs from the pocks could be powdered and blown up the nose of a healthy person. Those who had undergone variolation were likely to get a milder form of smallpox but they were still contagious for a month and had to be quarantined for that period. If all went well they survived and emerged with immunity to the disease. In the American colonies most doctors were against variolation because they considered the practice as dangerously spreading the disease to otherwise uninfected people. The use of variolation was very controversial. George Washington, who had survived smallpox in the 1750s, became a proponent of the procedure as was Benjamin Franklin, John and Abigail Adams, and the Reverend Cotton Mather. The British routinely employed variolation to protect their army. During the siege of Boston in 1775-1776 Washington’s army suffered substantial losses from smallpox which had spread from the town to his troops. Washington had taken sanitary and other precautions short of variolation to stop the spread within his army, with little success. By 1777 Washington would no longer hesitate to use variolation. He ordered the procedure for the American troops encamped at Valley Forge.
In 1796 Edward Jenner developed a successful and less risky form of inoculation using cowpox pus which proved an effective alternative to variolation that provided the same immunity to smallpox. The last outbreak of the disease in America occurred in 1949. In living memory smallpox inoculations became commonplace for American school children. Many people have a scar on their upper arm that serves as a small but significant reminder of an ancient and terrifying disease that for millennia claimed the lives of millions and had neither a cure nor effective treatment.