That they have indeed done so, and in many different and ingenious ways, was the theme of Adrienne’s lecture and given its particular relevance in today’s anxious world, I was delighted when she agreed to a Q&A session that would give her thoughts on ancient biowar an opportunity to reach Expedition’s readers. How much sadder it is that some of humankind considers the infliction of such diseases on others as a justifiable weapon in times of war. This was a natural disaster one that at the time no one would have been able to predict. Within three days, all but two folk in the whole village were smallpox victims, and scarcely a third survived to remember this dreadful happening. So, as the sexton jumped back in dismay, everyone reeled from the nauseous stench that issued forth from the ground. Most of the inhabitants of the village were in attendance. Apparently in 1759 the sexton of the Somerset village of Chelwood was preparing the grave at a funeral and by chance drove his spade into the casket of a man who had died of smallpox some 30 years before. That sent me in search of a story chronicled in Horace Walpole’s British Traveller of 1784. As I sat with Adrienne before the lecture, I was reminded of those times and the sad truth stated by Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker in 1996 that “today’s secret weapons have a nasty habit of becoming tomorrow’s universal threat.”Īt the same time, because I have always been interested in the history of medicine and disease, I was intrigued by Adrienne’s observation that, even as late as 2002, Russia still had in frozen storage staggeringly large amounts of various strains of smallpox. In the early 1980s, I served on the American A-bomb Reassessment Program for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and among my colleagues for that Program was one of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project.
The lecture’s topic struck two very personal chords with me. An October 14, 2004, I had the pleasure of introducing a lecture at the Museum entitled “Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs: BiologicalWarfare in Antiquity,”by Adrienne Stuart Mayor, author of the superbly researched Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World.
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