As fact-conscious Americans begin to reflect on the 250th anniversary of the U.S.’s declaration of independence over Great Britain (1776), it’s a good time also to revere another U.S. milestone that occurred just one year later (1777): Commander in Chief George Washington’s call for mandatory smallpox inoculations for all Continental Army recruits and soldiers in service.
Washington did not come to this decision easily. For the first two years of the Revolutionary War he correctly scorned the virus’s average six-week period of illness and quarantine as a plight as much of the army — thousands of American soldiers died from smallpox in those first two years — as the individual.
But by favoring smallpox inoculation as an individual’s prerogative — essentially because he feared that mandating it en masse might cripple the Continental Army, and thus also its prospects for victory over the British — Washington’s unwitting stance for autonomy ignored the greater good.
Washington came to understand his error when he started consulting his soldiers and medical staff for help weighing his opinion about smallpox inoculations on their facts: key among them that less than 1% of those inoculated died, and that all gained immunity to the disease.
The smallpox inoculation proved safe, and it worked.
George Washington’s push to understand the facts of smallpox, and significantly, how its spread throughout the Continental Army would decrease via well-timed treatments for the 230,000 soldiers who would serve under him during the seven years’ war, was a victory for right vs. wrong, and also, of course, for U.S. independence.
Washington’s open-minded, constructive campaign against smallpox cast its roots in February 1777. Before the end of that year the campaign was in full flower and he was able to write, “The camp is thought to be entirely clear of infection, and the country pretty much also.”