Benjamin Franklin used data to show smallpox variolation was safer than smallpox infection “the natural way”
One of the Founding Fathers used reason and numbers to convince people about variolation’s safety.
I’ve told you before that you shouldn’t put all the weight of your evidence on the p-value of your statistical analysis. Statistics help confirm the certainty of your findings, but they’re not the end-all, be-all of the truth of your observations. So what did you do to convince people that a medical intervention was safer than the alternative? You used a lot of reasoning with words and numbers, like Benjamin Franklin did.
Variolation is the precursor to vaccination. In variolation, you take fluid from the vesicles of a person with smallpox, and inject that fluid into a healthy person. The hope is that you’ve taken just enough material to not make the recipient too sick, and that you’ve used Variola minor instead of Variola major. One causes more severe symptoms than the other… I’ll let you guess which one.
