(NMHM,1919 - 1923)
"Patients with the infection were in agony-their skin felt as if it was being consumed by fire, and although they were tormented by thirst, lesions in the mouth and throat made it excruciating to swallow."
(Tucker, 2001)
Joaquin Duarte |
Charles Barber |
"Joaquin Duarte thought his 1939 battle with smallpox--the sweats, the delirium and the scarring sores--was among the scourge's last gasps in this country. Six decades later, he is sweating over the possibility that terrorists will bring it back. It's pretty bad, said Duarte, 81, recalling the days he lay inside his covered wagon, a tent of blankets, struggling not to scratch the pus-filled pox. 'I wouldn't want anybody to go through it. It's an awful thing to go through'" (Ornstein, 2001).
"My body was like one big scab, you understand?"
(Duarte, 2001) |
"San Antonio resident Charles Barber, 69, will never forget the suffering of his mother, father and brother, all of whom contracted smallpox in the last U.S. outbreak in 1949, in Texas' lower Rio Grande Valley. His mother died of smallpox and other complications; the others survived. Of his father he said..." (Ornstein, 2001)
"There was not a place on his body, including the palms of his hands and the bottom of his feet, where there wasn't a scab."
(Barber, 2001) "Barber was the only one able to care for his parents. His father was out of his head with fever when his mother died, he said. The intense physical discomfort wrought by the disease was made worse by patients' sense of isolation. No one could touch them" (Ornstein, 2001).
|
"I had seen polio patients in iron lungs who could see their families only through a window and with the help of a mirror. Smallpox separated patients from their loved ones, too, but in a different way. Pustules mixed with pus and blood might cover the face and the smell was overpowering. Visitors recoiled. and even hospital staff tried to avoid touching the patient."
(Foege, 2011)
(Foege, 2011)
(Smallpox Movies: Training and Education Compilation Disc 1, 1972)