Smallpox and Epidemiological-Demographic Change in Europe: The Role of Vaccination

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The relationship between smallpox epidemics, overall mortality and population growth, as reflected in an excess of births over deaths, has been examined with regard to the main sources of evidence from different parts of Europe. Epidemiological-demographic changes concomitant with different phases in the introduction of immunisation against the disease have been assessed in the light of evidence from records showing some causes of death as well as numbers of burials. By the eighteenth century; smallpox epidemics appear to have become predominant as an influence on fluctuations in overall mortality in much of Europe. Evidence is reviewed which suggests that although inoculation had probably protected many from smallpox after the mid-eighteenth century, to an extent that could have reduced overall mortality, vaccination enthusiastically promoted after 1800 had a dramatic epidemiological-demographic impact. Data from many sources have been summarised and indicate that the disease was virtually brought under control in North Western Europe during the course of the nineteenth century. Smallpox had probably caused between 8 and 20 per cent of all deaths directly in eighteenth-century Europe as well as unquantifiable secondary and associated morbidity and mortality. The removal of such a deleterious disease from a chain of infections affecting the population at this time, accounted for much of the increasingly more important role of mortality decline as the significant factor in demographic change. The evidence is circumstantial, but suggests that the unprecedented population growth of the early decades of the nineteenth century could in large part have been due to the control of smallpox through vaccination measures. The virtual elimination of the disease as a killer in Europe by the end of the century, following legislation and revaccination programmes was a unique achievement with further consequences for sustained population growth and improvements in health which for many were the only source of improvements in the standard of life.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: