Free The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston Page A

may have caused the Antonine Plague in Rome, which seems to have been carried home by Roman legions who fought in Syria in A.D. 164. Certainly smallpox rooted itself early in people living in the river valleys of China. The Chinese worshiped a goddess of smallpox named T’ou-Shen Niang-Niang, who could cure the disease. There was another goddess, Pan-chen, to whom people prayed if a victim’s skin began to darken with black pox. In A.D. 340, the great Chinese medical doctor Ko Hung gave an exact description of smallpox. He believed that the disease had first come to China “from the west,” about three hundred years before his lifetime.
    Variola may have caused a decline in the human population of Italy during the later years of the Roman empire, making the empire more vulnerable to collapse under barbarian attacks. (The population of Italy in late Roman times may also have been gutted by malaria, or perhaps by a double whammy of malaria plus smallpox.) Variola dwelled along the Ganges River in India for at least the past two thousand years. The Hindu religion has a goddess of smallpox, named Shitala Ma, and there are temples in her honor all over India. (
Ma
means the same in Hindi as it does in English—“mother.”) It is hard to say whether Shitala Ma is a good goddess or a bad one, but you certainly do not want to make her mad. In ancient Japan, smallpox arrived once in a while from China and Korea, but the virus couldn’t start a chain of transmission there because the population was too thin. Eventually, around A.D. 1000, the population in Japan reached four and a half million, and apparently two hundred thousand people began to live within about two weeks’ travel from one another; smallpox came to live with them, and they came to think of smallpox as a demon. In A.D. 910, the Persian physician al-Razi (Rhazes) saw a lot of smallpox when he was the medical director of the Baghdad hospital. Ancient sub-Saharan Africa had a relatively scattered human population and remained largely free of smallpox, except for occasional outbreaks along the coasts, triggered by the comings and goings of traders and slavers. The more concentrated the human population, the more likely it was to be thinned regularly by variola.
    In 1520, Captain Pánfilo de Narváez landed on the east coast of what is now Mexico, near Vera Cruz. His plan was to investigate the Aztec empire, which was centered in great and powerful inland cities. One of the members of Captain Narváez’s landing party was an African slave who was sick with smallpox. Variola hatched from tiny spots in the man’s mouth and amplified itself into a biological shockwave that ran from the seacoast back into the Aztec empire, ultimately killing roughly half of the human population of Mexico. The wave of death that came out of less than a square inch of membrane in the mouth of Captain Narváez’s man went through Central America, and it boomed along the spine of the Andes, where it gobsmacked the Inca empire. By the time the Spanish conquerors entered Peru, smallpox had softened the place up, and had killed so many people that the armies of the Incas had trouble putting up effective resistance. Smallpox had reduced the population of the Western Hemisphere while showing itself to be the most powerful de facto biological weapon the world has yet seen. (Measles was also lethal in Native American populations, and it worked alongside variola in the Americas.) During the French and Indian War, when Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa tribes was leading a siege against the British at Fort Detroit in 1763, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, the head of the British forces, wrote a letter to one of his field officers, Colonel Henry Bouquet: “Could it not be contrived to send smallpox among these disaffected tribes of Indians?” Amherst asked. “We must on this occasion use every stratagem in our power to reduce them.”
    Colonel Bouquet got the idea of the stratagem quite well, and his reply was to