Suzanne Delage:Quilts & smallpox
The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 13 May 1998
https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/612

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

------------------------------------------------------------------------------