Mozart and smallpox

In 1767, the 11-year-old composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was struck by smallpox. Like all smallpox victims, he was at serious risk of dying, but he survived the disease. This article discusses smallpox as it existed in Mozart's time, the decision taken in 1764 by Mozart's father Leopold not to inoculate his children against the disease, the course of Mozart's illness, and the aftermath.

Smallpox in 18th-century Europe was a devastating disease, recurring in frequent epidemics and killing or disfiguring millions of people. The 18th century was probably a particularly terrible time for smallpox in Europe: urbanization had increased crowding, making it easier for the disease to spread; yet effective protection from smallpox through a smallpox vaccine was discovered only at the end of the century (see below).

The disease was a terrible one for its victims. Ian and Jenifer Glynn write:

So what was it like? As children, we were told it was like chickenpox but worse. In fact it is not related to chickenpox, and it was unimaginably worse. In an unvaccinated population, something like 10–30 percent of all patients with smallpox would be expected to die. And dying was not easy; smallpox was, as Macaulay wrote, 'the most terrible of all the ministers of death.'

Those who survived smallpox did not always survive intact; it frequently inflicted blindness on its survivors. The survival rate was particularly low for children.

The physical appearance of the disease was frightening to patients and to their caretakers: the patient's skin became covered with large, bulging pustules, which often left conspicuous pitting on the skin of patients who survived the disease.

Medicine had made only slight progress against the disease in Mozart's time. Around the second decade of the 18th century the method of inoculation, which had originated in Asia, reached European countries. Inoculation was not the same as the vaccination which later succeeded in eradicating the disease; rather, an inoculated person was treated with live smallpox virus, taken from pustules of the mildest variety of smallpox that could be found.

Inoculation offered immunity to smallpox, but the procedure carried a definite risk that the inoculated person could die from smallpox as a result. Thus, many parents felt that they would rather do nothing, risking future smallpox arriving at random, rather than carry out a deliberate act that might well kill their children immediately.

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Wikipedia