Catherine The Great’s Letter About Smallpox Vaccination Goes Up For Auction
Image via Johann Baptist von Lampi the Elder / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
While discourse on vaccinations seems to be something that’s only gained mainstream attention in the last couple of years, turns out, it was an equally hot topic centuries ago.
An April 20, 1787, letter penned by Russian Empress Catherine the Great to the Count of Malorossiya (now Ukraine) had actually revolved around the importance of smallpox vaccination at the time.
According to The Moscow Times, the letter, which was previously held by a private collector, has recently gone on display for the first time in Russia, and will go under the hammer at the MacDougall’s auction house in London on December 1.
The Empress, who was on the throne from 1762 to 1796, was an outspoken advocate for vaccines. As per MacDougall’s, the public had been resistant to the idea of shots at the time, with Catherine being the first person in the nation to be vaccinated against smallpox, along with her son.
It took over 3,000 years before the smallpox virus was fully eradicated in 1980. In fact, it was so deadly, there were reports of the disease killing entire villages at once. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the first successful smallpox vaccine was created in 1796, when Doctor Edward Jenner discovered that people who had been infected with cowpox didn’t catch smallpox after.
“Among the other duties of the Welfare Boards in the Provinces entrusted to you, one of the most important should be the introduction of inoculation against smallpox, which, as we know, causes great harm, especially among the ordinary people,” wrote Catherine in Cyrillic, a Slavic alphabet.
“Such inoculation should be common everywhere,” she said.
Similar to vaccination centers that were set up at the beginning of 2021, the Empress said that each town should build a temporary location in abandoned convents or monasteries to vaccinate those who couldn’t do so in their own homes.
The letter will be auctioned alongside a portrait of Catherine, and is expected to go for about US$1.6 million.
[via Live Science, cover image via Johann Baptist von Lampi the Elder / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)]
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