ET TU Part One THE CURTAIN RISES

I believe the murder was set in motion far from the scene of the crime, in modern day Turkey, in a patch of desert about ten miles north of the border with Syria. In 53 B.C.E., this spot of emptiness was called Carrhae, and in Roman history that name is synonymous with shame. 

It was on the plain at Carrhae that 20,000 Legionaries died (above), and worse, 10,000 were captured, and even worse, it was here that the aristocrat’s aristocrat, the greedy bloodthirsty Marcus Licinius Crassus, was killed. 

Few who did not depend on Crassus for their financial security had reason to mourn his demise. But within ten years of his death, what was left of the Roman Republic would collapse, and the cause of democracy would be set back two thousand years – and all that occurred because Crassus got what he deserved. I would label all that the horrible unintended consequences of a good thing.

Marcus Licinius Crassus (above), the richest man in Rome, who also saw himself as a hero. He led the right wing at the battle of Coline Gate, which made Sulla dictator of Rome. He had defeated the slave armies of Spartacus, and lined the Appian Way with 6,000 crucified slaves. Then he had turned to running the finances of Sulla' s brutal regime. But now, at 60, he wanted to be a hero again. 

His plan to achieve this was to invade Parthia, the empire centered upon present day Iran. But age had not made Crassus more intellectually flexible or humble of spirit. When offered assistance from the King of Armenia, Crassus chose to keep all the plunder for himself.

So, in the spring of 53 B.C., at the head of seven veteran legions and 8,000 cavalry commanded by his son, Publius, Crassus crossed the Euphrates river at Zeugma, and almost immediately started making mistakes. 

He hired a guide who led him deep into a treeless desert near Carrhea (above), and then vanished. And once the legions were ankle deep in sand and desperately short of water, only then did the Parthian army appear - 10,000 cavalry armed with powerful bows.

Arrows showered upon the massed legions, wounding men and sapping moral. The Roman tactical response was to form the infantry into turtles (testudos) (above), closing ranks tightly, with the center ranks marching beneath their shields, and the soldiers on the edges presenting the enemy with a moving wall. 

But so strong were the Parthian bows that some arrows even penetrated the turtle's shell. It went on for hours. The turtles could only march in a straight line, and not very quickly under a baking desert sun. Eventually, reasoned Crassus, the Parthian bowmen would run out of arrows. But then he spotted large camel trains approaching, each dromedary carrying a fresh supply of arrows.

In desperation Publius's cavalry charged the camels, but the Parthian's proved adept at shooting while retreating - the famous Parthian shot (above), the sting in the scorpion's tail. 

Publius was killed and his cavalry scattered. The Parthians closed in again on the turtles and the arrows continued to shower down,  as did the merciless heat. Eventually Crassus was forced to retreat into the village of Carrhea.  After a night without water his officers forced Crassus to parlay with the Parthian commander. The meeting was a disaster. 

The deaf Crassus perceived an insult in some Parthian translation, and moved to remount his horse. A Parthian officer grabbed the horses' bridle. A proud Roman officer pulled his gladius to defend his commander's honor, and the Parthian generals slaughtered the Roman officers, including Marcus Licinius Crassus. After that, the Parthians fell upon the leaderless legions, and effectively wiped them out.

The legend is that after the slaughter, the Parthians poured molten gold into the severed head of the greedy Crassus. It sounds like a terrible waste of a precious metal, but then the war had been a terrible waste of seven irreplaceable Roman legions. But the two men in all the world who understood intuitively what a disaster Crassus' death really was for Rome, were his two greatest competitors.

The sardonic Sulla had nicknamed Gnaeus Pompeius, as Pompey the Great (above). But Sulla had meant it as a joke - whatever else he was, Sulla was a ruthless judge of character. Sent by Sulla to secure the Roman grain supplies in Sicily, the young Pompey had earned another nickname, 'the adolescent butcher'. 

When the citizens of one small Sicilian village argued his attack upon them was illegal, Pompey responded bluntly, “Stop quoting laws. We carry weapons!” Returning home, Pompey demanded a triumphal parade, usually reserved for military victories. After Sulla's death, the Senate dispatched Pompey to crush a rebellious general. Pompey bribed one of the rebel officers to kill the general, and then eliminated the traitor. His justification was typically blunt. “A dead man cannot bite”. And he claimed another triumph. Sent to crush pirates who were raiding Roman grain fleets, Pompey bought them off, and again, claimed a triumph - Pompey Maximus, indeed.

As the two richest and most ambitious men in Rome, Pompey and Crassus had initially cooperated to strengthen the tribuni plebis.

This was not out of some faith in the Senate, but to use the tribunes as a buffer between them. For four hundred years these 'Tribunes of the Plebs' had been a counter-balance to the aristocrats in the Senate. Elected by the whole male population, tribunes could not make laws, but they could veto any law passed by the Senate (above).  Sulla had reduced the tribunes to a ceremonial post. But Pompey and Crassus, increasingly driven apart by suspicion, paranoia and envy, used the tribunes to prevent their opponent from enacting policies they did not like. And one of the men supported by Crassus for tribune of the people had been Gaius Julius Caesar.

Sulla had taken one look at the smart, ambitious young Caesar (above), and marked him down for elimination. Julius avoided Sulla's assassins by joining the army. Once Sulla died, Julius returned to Rome, where Crassus backed his election as a Tribune and then sent him to Spain. While there Caesar had defeated two small tribes. This earned him the right to a triumph. Instead, Caesar asked Crassus for help, meaning money, to run for Tribune of the people.

Romans were so afraid of someone wanting to rule over them as a  king, that the Tribune term of office was just one year long, and there were two equal Tribunes  elected each year. Each had the power of veto over any action by the other or the Senate. This was a system designed to ensure deadlock.  As a result of the election in  60 B.C., Caesar (Crassus' man) was elected. 

But the other consul elected that year, Marcus Calpurnius Bilbus , was Pompey's man, meaning every law Crassus backed, Bibulus vetoed, and every law Pompey pushed, Caesar vetoed. And it was Caesar’s political genius that he saw the way to use this deadlock to increase his own power.

In 59 B.C., Pompey pushed for a land reform act that would give farms to veterans of his legions . Bibulus tried to veto the bill, but thugs hired by Caesar dragged Bilbulus out of the forum, threatened him and dumped a dung bucket on his head. The shaken man withdrew from public life.  Then quickly, Caesar moved to grant Pompey's veteran's equal lands. And that quickly power in Rome was changed, from a deadlocked confrontation between two men, into a more balanced government ruled by three - The First Triumvirate. As a reward for bringing peace between Crassus and Pompey, Caesar was appointed Governor of Trans-alpine Gaul, what today is France, for ten years.

Thus Caesar went seek his future in conquering and plundering Gaul with four legions. Pompey, who left his legions in Spain,  stayed in Rome to plunder the Republic. And the financier Crassus had turned eastward, to conquer and plunder Parthia with seven legions. 

But in 53 B.C.E. Crassus (above) had gotten himself killed, and the Roman Republic, was abruptly reduced to a direct confrontation between two men. It was a contest which must result in the death of one of them, and the Republic.

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TAKE YOUR BEST SHOT, Edward Jenner

 

I look at her face, and honestly, I just don't see whatever it was that captured his heart. They had the ultimate Age of Enlightenment cute-meet, but where he was a 38 year old endlessly curious bon vivant sociable genius, a doctor, a scientist and a poet, she had few friends and her only interest was religion. And at the age of 27, Catherine Kingscote must have thought, as her down turned mouth seems to indicate (above) that she had missed her chance to find a suitable husband.

And then on a fair September afternoon, his balloon landed in a meadow near her home, and two years later she married one of the greatest men – ever . He was to be the man responsible for saving hundreds of millions of lives by applying the scientific method to an obvious problem. Clearly Catherine must have had a secret appeal. And Edward Jenner was smart enough to recognize it.

Edward Jenner started life with a few advantages. He was born wealthy, but not so rich he didn't have to work for a living, just rich enough he never cared more about money than about people. He never patented his great discovery, because he didn't want to add his profit to the cost of saving lives. And maybe that was Catherine's influence. And maybe it was the humanity he'd always had. And maybe it was because when he was still a child, his own father had inoculated him against small pox.

The two most deadly diseases in the 18^th century were the Great Pox (syphilis) and the Small Pox (Variola – Latin for spotted). Reading the genetic code of Variola hints it evolved within the last 50,000 years from a virus that infected rats and mice, and then moved on to horses and cows and then finally to infecting people. 

It disfigured almost all of its human victims, leaving their features scared and pockmarked, even blinding some survivors. It killed half a million people every year – and 80% of the children who were afflicted. The chink in Variola's protein armor was that it had evolved into two strains, one which preferred temperatures of around 99 degrees Fahrenheit before it started dividing, and the second which preferred something closer to 103 degrees.

They called the lesser of these two evils the cow pox, and sometimes the udder pox, because that was where the blisters often showed up on infected milk cows. And it was the young women whose job it was to milk the cows who were the only humans who usually contracted the cow pox. 

They would suffer a fever, and feel weak and listless for a day or two, and, in sever cases have ulcers break out on their hands and arms. But recovery was usually rapid and complete, and there was an old wife's tale that having once contracted cow pox, the women would never suffer the greater evil of smallpox.  It was mucus from a cow pox ulcer which Richard's father had applied to his son's open flesh, in the belief it would somehow protect him from smallpox.

The working theory behind this idea was first enunciated by the second century B.C. Greek doctor, Hippocrates. Its most succinct version was “Like cures like.” Bitten by a rapid dog? Drink a tea made from the hair of the dog that bit you, or pack the fur into a poultice pressed against the wound. The fifteenth century C.E. Englishman, Samuel Pepys, was advised to follow this theory by drinking wine to cure a hangover. “I thought (it) strange,” he wrote in his diary, “but I think find it true.” 

In 1765 London Doctor John Fewster published a paper entitled “Cow pox and its ability to prevent smallpox.” But he was just repeating the old wife's tale, and offered no proof of his own. So the idea was out there. It only waited for someone smart enough to put the obvious to a scientific test.

In early May of 1796, Sarah Nelms, a regular patient of Doctor Edwards, and “a dairymaid at a farmer's near this place”, came in with several lesions on her hand and arm. She reported cutting her finger on a thorn a few weeks previous, just before milking her master's cow, Blossom.  Upon examining both Sarah and Blossom,  Edward diagnosed them both as suffering from the cow pox. 

And he now approached his gardener, Mr. Phipps, offering to inoculate ( from the Latin inoculare, meaning “to graft") his 8 year old son James, against small pox. The gardener agreed, and on 14 May 1796 Edward cut into the healthy boy's arm, and then inserted into the cut some pus taken directly from a sore on Sarah Nelms' arm.

Within a few days James suffered a slight fever. Nine days later he had a chill and lost his appetite, but he quickly recovered. Then, in July, 48 days after the first inoculation, Edward made new slices on both of James' arms. This time he inserted scrapings taken directly from the pustules of a smallpox victim. And this time what should have killed the boy did not even give the child a fever.  Nor did he infect his two older brothers, who shared his bed. 

Over the next 20 years James Phipps would have pus from a small pox victims inserted under his skin twenty separate times. And not once did he ever contract the disease. He married and had two children. And when Edward Jenner died, James was a mourner at his funeral. The original boy who lived did not pass away until 1853, at the age of 65.

Edward Jenner (above) coined the word vaccine for his discovery, from the Latin 'vacca' for cow, as a tribute to poor Blossom, whose horns and hide ended up hanging on the wall of London's St George's medical school library. And that was the whole story, but, of course it wasn't, because it wasn't that simple, because nothing is that simple - certainly not the immune response system developed on this planet over the last four billion years, nor the stupidity of simple human beings.

Edward duplicated his procedure with nine more patients, including his own 11 year old son, and then wrote it all up for the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. And those geniuses rejected it. They refused to publish it because they thought his idea was too revolutionary, and still lacked proof. So Edward, convinced he was on the right track, redoubled his efforts. When he had 23 cases and the Society still refused to publicize his work, Edward self published, in a 1798 pamphlet entitled “An Inquiry Into the Causes and Effects of the Variolæ Vaccinæ, Or Cow-Pox”

By 1800, Edward Jenner's work had been translated and published world-wide. And a few problems were revealed. There was a small percentage of patients who had an allergic reaction at the vaccination sites, and eventually it would be decided not to inoculate very young children, as their immune systems were not yet strong enough to resist the cow pox.

And without a fuller understanding of how the human immune system functioned, it was still impossible to know “to a medical certainty” (to use legal jargon) how the vaccine would affect specific patients. Still, the over all reaction was so positive that Edward was surprised by the reaction of the people he called the “anti-vaks”.

Opposition became centered on the Medical Observer, a supplemental publication by the daily newspaper, The Guardian.  After 1807, an under editor Lewis Doxat, it condemned Jenner's introduction of a “bestial humor into the human frame”. 

In 1808 its readers were assured they should presume “When the mischievous consequences of his vaccinating project shall have descended to posterity...Jenner shall be despised.” Edward was even accused of spreading Small Pox, for various evil reasons. 

The argument presented from the pulpit was that disease was the way God punished sin, and any interference by vaccination was “diabolical”.  

Under this barrage of fantasy and conspiracy the percentage of vaccinated children and adults in England still climbed up to around 76%.   But without 100% protection Variola found enough victims and survived. 

In January of 1902 there was yet another outbreak in England that killed more than 2,000 people.  But after that disaster, the doubters were finally silenced, at least in England, and vaccinations were required for all children.

About 500 million human beings world wide have died from Smallpox after Edward Jenner introduced his vaccine. But the last victim on earth was Rahima Banu, a 2 year old girl in Bangladesh, in 1975. At 18 she married a farmer named Begum, and they gave birth to four children (her again, below). And each of her children is living proof that while religion may save souls, science saves lives.  Science, not snake oil.

The scientists working for the World Health Organization issued a report on 9 December, 1979, which announced, “...the world and its people have won freedom from Smallpox.” Variola was finally extinct, wiped out to the last living cell, by the dedication of scientists and doctors and nurses working under their guidance. 

It was, as Jenner himself wrote after the first successful eradication of Smallpox on Caribbean islands, “I don’t imagine the annals of history furnish an example of philanthropy so noble, so extensive as this.” It is hard to believe there are still idiots today who question the value of vaccinations.   

His dear Catherine died of tuberculosis in 1815, and Edward followed her in January of 1823. And for his life – and her's – we all owe a great debt. He was like the bird in his poem “Address to a Robin”: “And when rude winter comes and shows, His icicles and shivering snows, Hop o'er my cheering hearth and be, One of my peaceful family: Then Soothe me with thy plaintive song, Thou sweetest of the feather'd throng!”

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