Polite Dissent

A history of smallpox and smallpox vaccination from the pages of Ben Casey #2 (click on the image for the full page). It’s not exactly a current history of the disease as you’ll notice when you read the last paragraph — but it was current back in 1963, when this issue of Ben Casey was published. Technically, I guess smallpox could still be considered a “lurking menace” (but for different reasons now: biological weapon versus natural disease) — for the record, there hasn’t been a naturally occurring case of the disease since 1977 (and because I know somebody’s going to ask, there has been at least once case from a lab accident in the late ’70s. There have been some more recent vaccination-related infections, but the virus used for vaccination is vaccinia, a different virus than smallpox (variola)).

Tags: comics medicine psa smallpox ben casey