By CONNIE ZEIGLER
Contributing editor
ON APRIL 6, 1848, George A. Chapman, co-owner of the Indiana State Sentinel with his brother Jacob Page Chapman, published a notice on the front page of their newspaper. Referring to himself in the third person he wrote, “Saying to its friends that he has once more assumed his station” at the newspaper, but “His face has been made harder than of yore by the terrible attack of the small pox from which he has just recovered.” A common result of the dangerous disease, even in mild cases, were the scars or “pocks” that remained from the pustules it caused.
A note about spelling as you read: “smallpox” is the current accepted spelling of the word, but 19th Century newspapers tended to use “small pox.” The latter is used here only if in quotes.
If any readers of the Sentinel were familiar with the Buddhist concept of Karma they might have considered that Chapman’s infection was a manifestation of it, considering that the Sentinel, a full-throated Democratic Party organ, had lately published several snarky missives aimed at the state legislature and the other local newspaper the Indianapolis Journal for overreacting to the possibility of smallpox infection.
In one editorial published Jan. 6, 1848, the Chapmans ridiculed the members of the state legislature saying that after the report of “one single case of small pox” they closed the legislative session early and “abandoned the Capitol in a manner that far surpasses any retreat of Santa Ana since the commencement of the [Mexican] war.”
The editorial claimed that “it [smallpox] has appeared in almost every town of note in Indiana during the last two years, without producing any serious consequences or alarm,” but the legislators were alarmed enough to take the first train home when news of a potential outbreak broke.
In skeptical rhetoric that seems sadly familiar in the wake of the Covid pandemic, the Sentinel had already published another editorialized article two weeks earlier than the above. In this one they “guffawed” at the alarm with a series of jokes: “Why is the Indiana legislature like a young lawyer? Because it is highly excited over a single case.” After a few similarly toned bon mots (in this case bon nots might be a better descriptor), the editors noted that “as far as we have or can obtain any knowledge, no danger whatever exists, nor, in reality, has existed in this city.”
Unfortunately, smallpox was not a follower of the State Sentinel. One of the deadliest infectious diseases in historic times, an outbreak could spread quickly and, according to the World Health Organization, killed one in three infected people.
While the Indianapolis Journal was reporting an increase in cases, the Sentinel, by Jan. 27, 1848, was still downplaying any seriousness of the situation while also noting that, aside from one death, there were now four new cases reported by the Board of Health.
Rumors began to spread through and about the city even faster than smallpox. By the end of the month the Greenfield Investigator newspaper had reported 27 cases and that the Palmer House hotel Downtown had closed due to contagion. The Sentinel disputed both claims and stated that the Palmer House was simply not very busy. But then on Jan. 31, H.J. and B.C. Horn, owners of a retail establishment, printed a “card” in the Sentinel stating that a report that one of their clerks had contracted the disease was false, that Mr. Ashbridge, the sick man, occasionally assisted them but he was not in the store for at least a week or two before becoming ill and becoming bedridden with smallpox at the Palmer House.
By May 1848, the City Council had contracted with Seth Bardwell to build a smallpox hospital. He had already framed it when, on May 25, he returned to the Council to ask for more money to complete it, as reported in the State Sentinel buried within the proceeds of the City Council. In July, the Sentinel reported two more cases. The following July the City Council approved a stipend for Allen Green for caring for a person sick with smallpox and another for the patient’s mother to reimburse her for the cost of her son’s clothing and other effects, which Green had burned to try to stop any disease from spreading.
For years, the local newspapers continued to report on cases of smallpox in the city. During the years of the Civil War, outbreaks were common. Even Abraham Lincoln caught smallpox in November 1863 shortly after delivering the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln survived what historians now think was a serious case of the disease. His personal valet, William Johnson, who cared for him while he was ill, contracted the disease from Lincoln and died from it in January 1864, according to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia’s History of Vaccines.
The inexplicable tragedy of all these smallpox cases, whether or not the number of them was overwhelming, was that an effective vaccine had been in existence since the late 1700s. An English physician, Dr Edward Jenner, developed an inoculation for smallpox by using fluid from a cowpox pustule. It worked. Jenner’s vaccine – plus a less reliable but still sometimes effective homemade inoculation that people performed themselves by extracting fluid from a pustule of an infected person and then injecting it (yes, gross) – greatly reduced the number of infected by the late 19th Century.
Some states enacted smallpox vaccine requirements around this time. Indiana was not one of those states. And so, outbreaks continued to occur in the Capital into the 20th Century. In 1900 the Board of Health ordered vaccinations for school children, drawing a huge protest at the courthouse and an eventual withdrawing of the requirement. On Jan. 26, 1902, the Indianapolis Journal reported that there were 37 cases of active smallpox in Indianapolis, that the “pest house at the City Hospital [was] full, and eighteen cases of smallpox [were] scattered throughout the city.”
Finally, in 1905, Indiana State Sen. Newhouse introduced a bill for compulsory vaccination. The bill “applies especially to school children and makes evidence of successful vaccination a requirement for admission to public, private and parochial schools of the State,” according to an article in the Indianapolis News on Jan. 31, 1905.
A similar bill passed in Massachusetts became the foundation of a lawsuit that reached the U. S. Supreme Court the same year that Indiana made inoculation compulsory. That suit, Jacobsen v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, upheld in 1905 that states could compel vaccinations. The court, according to the National Library of Medicine website, said that the freedom of the individual must sometimes be subordinated to the common welfare and subjected to the police power of the state.
Through compulsory vaccinations across the U.S., Europe, Africa and eventually around the world, smallpox was eradicated finally by the late 1970s. According to the World Health Organization, it is the only infectious human disease to have been eradicated. Vaccines did that.
Connie Zeigler holds a master’s degree in history. She enjoys digging up a surprising, forgotten story and sharing her pirate’s booty with Urban Times readers.
