Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  How many people died from smallpox before inoculation? A few examples from London: 38 deaths in 1666, 60 in 1684, 82 in 1636. In short, hardly any.

  At the court of Vienna, before Joseph’s case, smallpox had struck only Ferdinand IV. But after Joseph the disease exploded, and by the end of the eighteenth century it had killed nine more Habsburgs. There were countless cases of haemorrhagic smallpox in those years, and all ended with the death of the patient.

  Here are two descriptions of the illness for the sake of comparison. The first is by Scipione Mercuri, the famous Roman doctor who lived from 1540 to 1615 (La commare, Venezia 1676, libro terzo, cap. XXIV, p. 276, Delle Varole e cura loro), and therefore prior to the introduction of inoculation. It will be noted that Mercuri, too, considers smallpox and measles as similar (he deals with them extensively also in De morbis puerorum, lib. I, De variolis et de morbillis, Venetiis, 1588).

  The second description of smallpox is by Doctor Faust, taken from the essay already cited of 1798, and therefore at the height of the vaccinatory euphoria.

  Here is Mercuri:

  I will now deal with the universal external illnesses; and first of all the commonest, which is the ‘roviglione’ known in this country as ‘varole’. Between ‘varole’ and measles there are some differences: nonetheless because both of them receive the same treatment, I will deal with them together. ‘Roviglioni’ or ‘varole’ are little pustules, or blisters, which break out all over the body, particularly spontaneously with pain, itching and fever, and when they break they become sores . . . The signs that pre-announce their arrival are stomach ache, hoarseness, redness in the face, headache, copious sneezing. The signs that reveal them as having already arrived are delirium, little pustules or blisters over the whole body, now white, now red, now larger, now smaller, depending on the different bodies of the patients. ‘Varole’ for the most part do not kill, except occasionally when, either because of the air or due to other mistakes committed by the doctors, as many people die as in a plague.

  And here is Faust’s description in 1798:

  With countless pustules, smallpox presses in from head to foot. It is as if the body is immersed in boiling oil, the pain is atrocious. With suppuration, the face becomes monstrously swollen and disfigured; the eyes are closed, the throat enflamed, blocked and unable to swallow water which the rale demands incessantly. The invalid is therefore deprived at the same time of light, air and water; his eyes emit pus and tears; the lungs exhale a fetid smell; the dribble turns acrid and involuntary; the excrement corrupt and purulent, and the urine is equally thick. The body is all pus and pustules and cannot move or be touched; it moans and lies motionless, while the part on which it lies is often gangrenous.

  There is an equally horrific verse description that Abbot Jean-Joseph Roman wrote in 1773 in his poem L’inoculation about a sufferer from smallpox:

  A pain not felt before attacks him now,

  His eyes are filled with seething scorching liquid;

  And dribble, running from his foaming mouth,

  Does naught to quench the thirst that burns his palate:

  He has no longer use of his chained senses,

  Amid dark clouds he only sees grim shades,

  His voice is toneless, and his mangled body

  Is but the prison of a downcast spirit.

  The description of the haemorrhage found in Joseph I appears very similar to the “smallpox purpura” described by Dr Gerhard Buchwald, a German doctor almost ninety years old now, in his book Vaccination. A Business Based on Fear, 2003 (original German title: Impfen: Das Geschäft mit der Angst, Munich 2000). Dr Buchwald is one of the rare doctors still alive to have personally observed and studied smallpox cases. In 2004 we sent him the documentation concerning Joseph’s illness. We then had a long conversation on the telephone. Based on his own experience Buchwald claims that damage to the blood vessels is only and exclusively found in cases of smallpox induced by viruses injected into the vessels. The same conclusion can be read in his book (p. 50 of the German edition), which states that the haemorrhagic course of the disease is to be attributed to the recent injection of the virus and always ends in death.

  In short, for Buchwald there is no such thing as naturally occurring haemorrhagic smallpox; it is caused by the introduction of the practice of inoculation/vaccination.

  There are numerous studies on smallpox that make the claim that subcutaneous inoculation had been known in China and India for millennia. The same propaganda was spread in the eighteenth century to inspire confidence in the practice. It is false.

  As far as China is concerned, the Jesuit father D’Entrecolles, a missionary in Peking, is often cited as a source. But he wrote in May 1726, no earlier than that, and does nothing but quote a passage from a Chinese book which describes the practice of immunisation from smallpox, but by inhalation and not inoculation. There is no connection with inoculation, therefore; indeed, the Jesuit specifies that according to Chinese doctors it would be lethal for smallpox to enter the body by means that were not natural (like the nose), but through an incision in the skin. The famous treatise of the history of Chinese medicine by Chimin Wong and Wu Lien-Teh (History of Chinese Medicine, Shangai 1936) makes the same claim and adds that some medical historians point to India as the place where inoculation began.

  The famous Indian doctor, a professor at the University of Calcutta, Girindranath Mukhopadhyaya, in his History of Indian Medicine (Delhi 1922–29, vol. I, pp. 113–33), examines all the claims about the practice of inoculation in India having its roots in the distant past. Mukhopadhyaya reaches the same conclusion as us: there is no evidence of this. There are doctors – nearly all English – who have written studies in which they claim to have heard stories from ancient times that refer to this practice. One of them, a certain Doctor Gillman, has even unearthed a Sanskrit treatise of medicine that mentions inoculation. Mukhopadhyaya had the text examined by two Sanskrit scholars, who recognised it as an “interpolation”: a blatant forgery, in short. In the ancient Indian treatises of medicine by Caraka, Suśruta, Vāgbhata, Mādhava, Vrnda Mādhava, Cakradatta, Bhāva Miśra and others, Mukhopadhyaya could not find the slightest allusion to the practice of smallpox inoculation. Furthermore, in the hymns to the Goddess Śitalā, taken from the Kāikhanda by Skanda Purāna, it is explicitly stated that there is no remedy for smallpox except prayers to the goddess. And yet Mukhopadhyaya says emphatically, “no one has yet questioned the notion that inoculation was frequently practised in India.”

  Mukhopadhyaya suspects, as we do, a conspiracy to provide a pedigree first for inoculation and subsequently for vaccination, so that the masses would be induced to trust these practices and to let them be carried out on themselves and on their children.

  (In addition to forgeries, the history of smallpox contains numerous embarrassing silences. The inventor of vaccination – which was what inoculation subsequently developed into – the famous English doctor, Edward Jenner, vaccinated his own ten-month-old son with material extracted from the pustules of a smallpox victim, and the child was left mentally handicapped and died at the age of twenty-one. Later on, in 1798, Jenner vaccinated a child aged five, who died almost immediately, and an eight-month pregnant woman, who just a month later miscarried a baby covered in pustules similar to smallpox. Despite these experiences, Jenner sent samples of the material used for these experiments to the ruling houses of Europe, which made widespread use of them on orphan children to develop new diseases in order to be able to extract new samples of infected material. Every manual of medical history carefully avoids reporting these facts.)

  Let us return to the eighteenth century. Soon several voices were raised against inoculation. The tragic case of Madame de Sévigné was pointed to; she, too, fell ill of smallpox and died in 1711. However, it was not the illness that killed her but, amid atrocious suffering, the doctors’ treatment of it (cf. J. Chambon, Traité des métaux et des minéraux, Paris 1714, p. 408 ff.). In the mid-eighteenth century
Luigi Gatti, an Italian doctor in Paris, treated Madame Helvétius’s smallpox, performing all sorts of somersaults and pirouettes in front of the invalid, firmly convinced that cheerfulness was the only possible remedy, and that it was only medical treatment that made smallpox fatal. For mysterious reasons, Gatti was to change his opinion drastically, suddenly becoming a highly active (and extremely wealthy) inoculator.

  Van Swieten, in the nineteenth century, reported that noble and wealthy patients almost all died, while the common people, who did not undergo any treatment, survived (cf. Rapport de l’Académie de Médecine sur les vaccinations pour l’année 1856, p. 35).

  That was not all: rumours began to circulate that inoculation, when it did not kill, was entirely useless. There were cases of people who, despite having undergone inoculation and having suffered the smallpox caused by it, nonetheless fell ill of the disease, even years later. The Mercure de France of January 1765 (vol. II, p. 148), for example, reports the case of the Duchess of Boufflers.

  But the worst fear was yet to come: did inoculation unleash smallpox even in people who had already had it? It was well known, as Avicenna himself said, that “smallpox only strikes once in a lifetime”, granting perpetual immunity. According to numerous doctors opposed to inoculation, artificially induced smallpox subverts this law of nature. The proof? A very famous case: Louis XV of France, who had had smallpox at the age of eighteen, died in 1774 aged sixty-four. Of smallpox. In circumstances almost identical to those of Joseph I.

  There was something special about Louis XV: as a child he was the only one who survived the incredible outbreak of fatal diseases that struck the children and grandchildren of his grandfather the Sun King, decimating the Bourbon House of France between 1711 and 1712. Count De Mérode-Westerloo (Mémoires, Brussels 1840) reports that Palatine had prophesied these deaths to him in 1706, describing them as murders. Little Louis in 1712 was just two years old, the second-born of the Duke and Duchess of Bourgogne. His parents and elder brother had died of smallpox, but Louis had been saved: his nurses, at the first signs of the child’s illness, had literally barricaded themselves in the bedroom with him, preventing the doctors from even seeing him. They were convinced that it was the doctors themselves who had killed the other members of the royal family. And so Louis was spared Palatine’s prophecy, and when he attained his majority he ascended the throne of France as successor to his grandfather Louis XIV. France, in the meantime, had been afflicted by years and years of Regency rule, during which the malign John Law, the inventor of banknotes, had been given free rein, leading the kingdom to an unprecedented financial disaster, as recounted by the chimney-sweep.

  But certain “prophecies”, sooner or later, always come true . . . At the age of sixty-four, Louis XV no longer had any brave wet nurses to protect him.

  His death closely recalls that of Joseph I. Both were enemies of the Jesuits (Louis XV actually suppressed the Society of Jesus) and Louis XV, like Joseph, had to endure the menacing announcement of his own death, unfortunately accurate, from a preacher. It was 1st April 1774, a Thursday in Lent, and the Bishop of Senez pointed at the King from the pulpit and exclaimed: “Another forty days and Niniveh will be destroyed!” Exactly forty days later, on 10th May, Louis XV breathed his last (Pierre Darmon, La variole, les nobles et les princes, Brussels 1989, pp. 93–4).

  Up to a week earlier, examining his boils, he had continued to murmur in amazement: “If I had not already had it, I would swear that this was smallpox.” Finally on 3rd May, realisation struck him: “It is smallpox! . . . It is smallpox.” With the mute assent of those around him, he turned his face away and said, “This is truly incredible.”

  A bitterly ironic death in many ways, not least for the fact that Louis XV had always been a tenacious opponent of the practice of inoculation.

  Having concluded our historical research into smallpox and having received Dr Buchwald’s opinion on Joseph’s death, we passed on to the final stage: the search for a pathologist who would support our request to exhume the Emperor’s body and who would be prepared to analyse it.

  We at once rejected the medical exhumers who are so fashionable today: they exhume the bodies of historical figures from the past essentially to develop new vaccines, and are usually sponsored by the colossi of the pharmaceutical industry.

  We turned to various Italian and Austrian university professors, but nobody was interested in the matter; indeed in many cases they actually seemed annoyed.

  There was something familiar in all this: in 2003, when we needed to find graphological experts to examine the last will and testament of the King of Spain Charles II of Habsburg, most of the experts had run a mile for fear of annoying the present Spanish king, Juan Carlos of Bourbon. So when it came to a matter of smallpox . . .

  Meanwhile we sent an application by registered mail to the Denkmalamt of Vienna (the office in charge of preserving historical monuments) to start the paperwork for the exhumation of the body of Joseph I. We knew that the procedure would be a long one and did not wish to lose any time.

  In the hope of finding someone a little more courageous, we proceeded through mutual acquaintances. And so we hit upon the name of Professor Andrea Amorosi, a pathologist from the same city as one of us. Amorosi works at the Department of Experimental Medicine and the clinic of the “Magna Grecia” University of Catanzaro, in southern Italy. Initially we had a very good relationship. Professor Amorosi was attentive and helpful. After studying all the documentation that we sent him, he was excited by the idea of exhuming Joseph’s body; it was he who informed us that smallpox is on the class A “special surveillance” list in the struggle against bio-terrorism. Our initiative, therefore, could cause a stir in the scientific community.

  We asked if it would be possible, after all this time, to prove whether Joseph had been poisoned, killed by an artificial smallpox, or had instead died from natural smallpox. In the case of a poison, he answered, it should not be too difficult, since at the time they mainly used metals, which can be traced by modern equipment. The poisons used today, he declared, leave no traces.

  In the case of death by inoculation, the professor went on to explain, the question was more complicated, but not impossible. It would be necessary to exhume several bodies, not just Joseph’s. The ideal situation would be to have bodies that had died from smallpox long before Joseph, when smallpox was not so lethal, in which case it would therefore be reasonable to assume that death was due to natural smallpox – and bodies that had died from smallpox later in the eighteenth century, in the age of inoculation. Then DNA sequences would have to be taken from these bodies and compared with those of Joseph I. Professor Amorosi kept us on the phone as he continued to explain all the possible ways to detect a possible artifical cause in the young emperor’s death, using an abundance of scientific terms. Lacking his professional expertise, we are unable to report Professor Amorosi’s ideas and intentions with the appropriate terminology.

  We arranged with Amorosi that first of all he would send us the pages from Harrison’s manual on internal medicine concerning bio-terrorism, and in the meantime he would talk with some of his colleagues, whom he did not identify as yet, with the aim of forming a team to carry out the exhumation and analysis of the bodies.

  We never heard from him again.

  We never received the photocopies from the Harrison manual (we got hold of them by ourselves), nor did we succeed in talking to Professor Amorosi again. He never replied to our emails. Our numerous phone calls, over a period of months, all ran up against the insuperable barrier of his secretary, nurse or assistant, who regularly asked us for our names, put us on hold and then told us that Professor Amorosi was not there. Then one day we shifted tactics, calling and refusing to accept yet another vague and off-putting response. We insisted, we called back five times the same day, then the next day, and so on for a week. Each time we explained the whole matter from scratch, even though we could sense that the person at the other end of the line did not w
ish to listen to us. We began to recognise their voices, and the voices recognised us. Our interlocutors contradicted themselves, and one of them after the briefest of greetings put the phone down on us. The people on the other end of the line were armed with a good deal of patience; they could have treated us worse. In June 2006, when for the umpteenth time we pronounced the words “exhumation”, “smallpox”, “inoculation”, finally a weary voice whispered to us: “Just how old are you? Do you realise what you’re doing? Let it go. And leave the professor alone.”

  We did not call again. For the first time since we had started our investigations into the past, we felt really frightened. The voice was not threatening. Quite the reverse: it seemed sincere. It was clear: Professor Amorosi had been intimidated by someone, to the point that he refused any contact with us, even to the extent of simply inventing a pretext and wriggling out of the business. Perhaps we really were playing with fire. We opened the chapter on bio-terrorism in Harrison’s manual on internal medicine. We read and re-read the same passage, as if it was only now that its significance had struck us: despite the continual urgings of the World Health Organisation to destroy every test tube sample of smallpox, at the CDC in Atlanta in the USA they still preserve these and carry out experiments of all kinds. The manual emphasised how the recombinant (or artificial) smallpox is much more devastating and dangerous than the natural one.

  We went back to Professor Buchwald’s book. The book reports every sort of malpractice committed until just a few decades ago to hide the number of deaths due to the anti-smallpox vaccine, and to pass them off as natural smallpox: substitutions of clinical records, suppression of reports and other things. The horrifying photos (pp. 49 and 50) of Waltraud B., a child horribly covered with pustules and scabs from smallpox provoked by anti-smallpox vaccine, and of the blood issuing from the eyes and open mouth of the corpse of a young nurse who died at Wiesbaden in the sixties from haemorrhagic smallpox, also caused by vaccination, caused our pens to drop. And not only metaphorically.