Of Indians, Blankets, Smallpox, and other B. S..
"So Lord ----'s coat has been covering a group of children blotched with small-pox. The Rev. D--- finds himself unpresentable from a cutaneous disease, which it is not polite to mention on the south of the Tweed, little dreaming that the shivering dirty being who made his coat has been sitting with his arms in the sleeves for warmth while he stitched at the tails. The charming Miss C. is swept off by typhus or scarlatina, and her parents talk about 'God's heavy judgement and visitation'. -had they tracked the girl's new riding-habit back to the stifling undrained hovel where it served as a blanket to the fever-stricken slopworker, they would have seen why God had visited them."
Source: 'Cheap Clothes and Nasty,' Charles Kingsley, in Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet, London, Macmillan, 1879, pp. lxxviii-lxxix .
As quoted in The Victorian Underworld, Donald Thomas, New York University Press, 1998, p. 29.
Slop work here refers to the tailor trade.
It occurred to me after reading this that there might be something wrong with the claim that smallpox infested blankets were given to American Indians as a form of biological warfare. But, not necessarily.
It is the timing that bothers me. Wasn't the claim that it was the British that gave such blankets to the Indians? I believe this would put the event before The Revolution, during the French and Indian wars, perhaps a hundred years prior to the scenes quoted above.
Granted, just because this biological nightmare was continuing during the Victorian Era and even as late as 1879 doesn't mean that the problem or method of spreading smallpox, etc. wasn't known to earlier military commanders.
But, does it make it more unlikely? Why not protect your own if the method of transmission is known? Perhaps disdain for the lower classes (an obvious problem in Britain at that time) would explain inaction, But, even when the consequences returned to harm some of the upper crust, why did it take a long time to fix?
Conclusion: I dunno! (But, weren't germs as the source of disease unknown until very recent times? Methinks so. The most dangerous germs today are the two-legged ones who infest our schools and our government. Why is it taking us so long to pinpoint the cause of our infection and eradicate it?).
Copyright © 2002, Donald L. Beeman. All rights reserved.
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