vampireapologist:

vampireapologist:

i can’t get over the whole development of the smallpox vaccine bc of the milk maids aspect like imagine livin’ back in the day and admittedly I don’t have a clue what the life of a milk maid was like but I have to guess it wasn’t EXTREMELY glamorous or anything but damn life was such a luck of the draw scenario like are ya gonna get smallpox? tetanus?? whooping cough?? everyone’s dying of everything but everyone’s ESPECIALLY terrified of smallpox but

you and your friends/coworkers just never fuckin get it and if you even notice you’d have no idea why.

ur just like. “welp guess i’m not gettin’ smallpox even tho like 3 ppl I know just died of it time to milk this cow”

WHAT THE FUCK!!!!

if you don’t know what I’m taking about:

smallpox was like the Big Bad of infectious disease. Apparently by the 1600s it replaced the plague as the main cause of infectious death. It was bad.

Anyway, milkmaids (women who, y’know, milked cows) were often exposed to the cow version of the disease, cowpox. Their exposure to cowpox gave their bodies the necessary “heads up” on how to fight smallpox, the way modern vaccinations do now.

So milkmaids p much just, weren’t getting smallpox.

Milkmaids were also known for having really nice skin, and one reason would be none of them were scarred or disfigured from suffering and surviving smallpox.

Anyway, eventually a doctor was like “hey what’s the deal with that” and figured out inoculating ppl with cowpox would prevent smallpox and we got the smallpox vaccine and smallpox was the first and only infectious disease officially fuckin’ eradicated which is metal as hell.

Allegedly it saves 2 million lives a year.

Anyway, I just think it’d be wild to be a milkmaid and just be living ur normal average milky life but also you’re fucking immune to the worst infectious terror of the entire world.

Talk about job perks.