Europe. The earliest physician to describe smallpox is Ahrun, a
Christian Egyptian, who wrote in Greek. He lived in Alexandria
from A.D. 610 to 641. The first independent treatise on the
disease was by the famous Arabian physician, Rhazes, who wrote
in Syriac in 920 A.D., but his book has been translated into
both Greek and Latin. The first allusion to smallpox in English
is in an Anglo-Saxon manuscript of the early part of the tenth
century; the passage is interesting--"Against pockes: very much
shall one let blood and drink a bowl full of melted butter; if
they [pustules] strike out, one should dig each with a thorn
and then drop one-year alder drink in, then they will not be
seen," this was evidently to prevent the pitting dreaded even
at so early a date. Smallpox was first described in Germany in
1493, and appeared in Sweden first in 1578.

[2] Osler thinks the pesta magna of Galen was smallpox; Marcus
Aurelius died of it.



The contributions of Sydenham, the English Hippocrates, to the
knowledge of smallpox, are classical.

Throughout the Middle Ages, owing to the very crowded and
unsanitary state of the cities of Europe, smallpox was one of
the various plagues from which the inhabitants were never free
for any length of time.[3] Leprosy, influenza, smallpox,
cholera, typhus fever and bubonic plague constituted the
dreadful group. In most countries, including England, smallpox
was practically endemic; an attack of it was accepted as a