“I don’t ‘old with this ‘ere vaccination, Mrs. Green. What’s vaccination done for my little Tommy? Since I ‘ad ‘im done ‘e’s ‘ad whooping cough, chicken-pox, measles–in fact, everythink but small-pox!”
(Punch, London, 1915)
At home: “Oh, my goodness, Mama, why do I have to get a smallpox vaccination? It’s embarrassing: the doctor will see my naked arm!”
At the ball: “I’m very grateful, doctor, that you want to rid me of this shawl: it’s making me so warm…”
(Razvlechenie, Moscow, 1873)
(See Spanish, Czech, Polish, and Swedish variants on this sexist theme.)
“….I asked around attentively about the state of the region. Were there any diseases in their province, rampant agues, any kind of deadly fevers, smallpox and the like…”
(Illiustratsiia, St. Petersburg, 1846; reprinted in A. A. Agin (artist) and E. E. Bernadskii (engraver), 100 Drawings for Gogol’s Dead Souls, 1892)
“Well! let’s see, and at your place, how’s it going with you, cutie?”
“Not too bad, not too bad; lots of colds; a bit of bronchitis, some smallpox… But, as papa was saying to me yesterday, for everything to go altogether, entirely well, we would need… a good little epidemic.”
(Le Journal amusant, Paris, 1872)
A wealthy but incapacitated old man whose depiction is more edifying than amusing, as impressionable young children are led away from the brutal scarring of smallpox. Note the young lackey poised to lance the pustules. Excerpt from an accompanying text: “Strike the face! is also the battle cry of smallpox: the nose, the mouth, and the eyes are found by it as if cast into a mold, and one hardly cares to run the chance of a revision, the results of which are so clearly planned. It is true that if the smallpox comes to deprive you of an eye, to make you deaf in an ear, it will take care to enlarge your nose, to thicken your lips, to enlarge your mouth, and thus establish a balance between profits and losses.”
(Charles Aubry et al., Album comique de pathologie pittoresque, recueil de vingt caricatures médicales, Paris, 1823, via Wellcome Collection)
“This little rosebush that you gave me this winter, it nicely reminded me of you when you had smallpox.”
“Ah! that’s sweet!”
“Yes, because of the buds!” [a synonym for pimples]
(Le Journal amusant, Paris, 1871)
“Ah! what a year! what a year! The foreign invasion, the civil war, the smallpox, the rinderpest!”
“And with all that, my spinach which did not want to go to seed!”
(Le Journal amusant, Paris, 1871)
A tempera painting workshop
A remarkably beautiful young girl, wishing to take shelter from seducers, comes to beg a young assistant to paint her face with frightful marks of smallpox. [“Rapin” is richer with meaning than “assistant,” and designates a painter without talent, but possessing bohemian allure.]
(Le Journal amusant, Paris, 1874)
“As if it wasn’t disgusting… Burying this man who died of small pox next to my late husband, who never had it!”
(La Caricature, Paris, 1902) (A German cartoon in a similar vein.)
(From newspapers.) People’s Welfare Minister Rudevics has raised the issue of disinfecting incoming items in order to protect officials.
Woman: “If you don’t mind: from the countryside with a petition?! First of all, present a certificate that you’ve had a bath; then a certificate that you have been vaccinated against smallpox, typhus, cholera, tuberculosis, or rhinitis, then a document that your family is not insane; then a covering letter disinfecting the petition; then …”
Petitioner: “Then I better wait and bring a certificate that I am dead and buried!…”
(Svari, Riga, 1927)
“My dear, I got vaccinated…”
“And me too, right here…”
“Our age no longer fears God, but it greatly fears smallpox!”
(Le Journal amusant, Paris, 1907)
A farmer comes to the doctor to get vaccinated. The doctor, already busy vaccinating several women, tells him to wait in the next room and just undress for the time being. The farmer goes out and after a quarter of an hour, to the horror of the doctor, comes in again stripped down to his shirt:
“If you don’t step outside, you insolent fellow,” the doctor yells, “get dressed again immediately!”
“Yes, what do I know, Doctor,” says the farmer, “where one is vaccinated.”
(Fliegende Blätter, Munich, 1871)
(City Council members fighting over budgets)
“And does this mean there’s cause for alarm?”
“No, ma’am; but the City Council recommends the vaccine because while the people are occupied with this, they won’t remember the other stuff.”
(La Esquella de la torratxa, Barcelona, 1912)
“The smallpox vaccine gave all the kids who have math homework a little fever today.”
(Carrefour, Paris, 1955)
“The concierge’s maid is always banging on the piano; didn’t you tell her that smallpox is in the neighborhood?”
“Yes, but she was vaccinated in her leg and it only bothered her for the pedals!”
(Journal de Dreux Illustré, Dreux, 1904)
Sic Transit Pestilentia 