Better Native American Knowledge in Medicine

The trouble with variolation is that it requires advance planning to implement.

If you try variolation in the middle of a smallpox epidemic in the community, it may have very little effect, as people are infected and dying anyway.

It would only work if you variolate and then keep someone who is variolated from being concurrently infected by smallpox. That's hard to do.

To effectively variolate, you would have to reach an uninfected community or caste, and then try and do it before they epidemic reaches them.
 
The trouble with variolation is that it requires advance planning to implement.

If you try variolation in the middle of a smallpox epidemic in the community, it may have very little effect, as people are infected and dying anyway.

It would only work if you variolate and then keep someone who is variolated from being concurrently infected by smallpox. That's hard to do.

To effectively variolate, you would have to reach an uninfected community or caste, and then try and do it before they epidemic reaches them.

True.

On the other hand, it'd be much more difficult to talk a tribe into adopting the practice outside of a disaster setting. It would really be difficult. And after all, there is still some use in arriving late. With the Iroquois, for example, there were at least 2, probably 3-4 smallpox epidemics between the first exposure and their destruction in war. The gap there is more than a century and a half.

Obviously it would be better to avoid the disaster in the first place. Things will be bad enough with all the other plagues they'll be subject to. But it's better than nothing!
 
The trouble with variolation is that it requires advance planning to implement.

If you try variolation in the middle of a smallpox epidemic in the community, it may have very little effect, as people are infected and dying anyway.

It would only work if you variolate and then keep someone who is variolated from being concurrently infected by smallpox. That's hard to do.

To effectively variolate, you would have to reach an uninfected community or caste, and then try and do it before they epidemic reaches them.

Not true, this is from the CDC FAQ on smallpox.

"If someone is exposed to smallpox, is it too late to get a vaccination?

Vaccination within 3 days of exposure will completely prevent or significantly modify smallpox in the vast majority of people. Vaccination 4 to 7 days after exposure likely offers some protection from disease or may modify the severity of disease."
 
Not true, this is from the CDC FAQ on smallpox.

"If someone is exposed to smallpox, is it too late to get a vaccination?

Vaccination within 3 days of exposure will completely prevent or significantly modify smallpox in the vast majority of people. Vaccination 4 to 7 days after exposure likely offers some protection from disease or may modify the severity of disease."
Variolation and vaccination aren't the same thing. With variolation, you're actually giving someone smallpox and hoping that they don't die from it. If someone is already infected, giving them more of the same virus isn't going to help. A vaccine can prevent or reduce symptoms by exposing the immune system to lots of antigens while the virus is still getting started. By the time the virus has begun replicating, the immune system might be primed enough to fight it off. In a normal infection, the immune system doesn't learn to recognize the pathogen until it has begun spreading because initial amounts of antigen are low.

Variolated people will also infect people around them with smallpox, so a community with no prior exposure to smallpox will need everyone variolated or else you'd be causing an epidemic rather than preventing one.
 
Okay I see what you're saying.

In that case, about the best we can hope for is ways to limit the damage. Quarantine the sick, burn all the blankets, and hydrate with plenty of boiled water. They will need to make a ritual of this to be effective.

What if we turned this around. What if Europeans had better medical knowledge. If they understood variolation and practiced better sanitation wouldn't the transmission of diseases be reduced?
 
What about an earlier penicillin treatment?

Ancient people in the old world used various types of moulds to treat infections for thousands of years. Some thirty years before Flemming's discovery, Ernest Duchesne learned from Arab stable boys that moulds cured saddle sores on horses, and found injecting the mould they grew to mice cured typhoid (which Flemming's strain did not)

Medicine in the ancient world involved empirical experiments with plants, why not with moulds? In modern times the best strain of penicillin was isolated from a moldy cantaloupe found in a market in Illinois. Mass production of penicillin was unfeasible until it was discovered the mould grows really well in vats of corn steep water. Needless to say there would be an inexhaustible supply available to any Native American civilization.

One POD might be if the Aztecs discover pots of moldy water from what's left over of cooking corn cured fevers and wounds. They start bottling it as a cure all, and different appellations appear with reputations for potency for various aliments.
 
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What about an earlier penicillin treatment?

Penicillin won't do anything for smallpox, measles, influenza, or most of the other big killers, either. As an antibiotic, it only works on bacterial infections, and not even all of them. Tuberculosis (one of the biggest bacterial killers) is unaffected by most antibiotics. IIRC, that includes penicillin.
 
Penicillin won't do anything for smallpox, measles, influenza, or most of the other big killers, either. As an antibiotic, it only works on bacterial infections, and not even all of them. Tuberculosis (one of the biggest bacterial killers) is unaffected by most antibiotics. IIRC, that includes penicillin.

Typhoid was one of the biggest killers, second only to smallpox and is treated with antibiotics. As noted earlier, Duchesne's moulds was reportedly effective. Chloramphenicol was the main antibiotic treatment for typhoid and it is derived from a bacteria in rotten vegetation.
 
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