# Suzanne Delage:Quilts & smallpox *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 13 May 1998* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Michael Doolittle *13 May 1998, 19:26* >> William: the smallpox bit won't wash, not in a quilt from >> American Revolution times. While the idea of leprosy coming >> through infected items might have occurred to some colonists >> (via the Biblical precepts thereon), it's unlikely that >> anyone would have tried to pass smallpox on through germ >> warfare in those pre-van-Leewenhoek days. Actually the smallpox is possible. I've read several accounts of European colonists and/or soldiers giving clothes/bedclothes from smallpox victims to Native Americans *specifically* in the hope that they would catch the disease. Mike ---