В 1774 английский фермер Benjamin Jesty делает своей семье прививку дающую иммунитет от натуральной оспы. В 1774 король Франции Louis XV умирает от натуральной оспы.
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"What Money Cannot Buy". <•> But to really drive home the point, we need to go back to 1774. <•> As the American Revolution was heating up, a wave of smallpox was raging on the other side of the Atlantic. An English dairy farmer named Benjamin Jesty was concerned for his wife and children. He was not concerned for himself, though — he had previously contracted cowpox. Cowpox was contracted by milking infected cows, and was well known among dairy farmers to convey immunity against smallpox.
Unfortunately, neither Jesty's wife nor his two children had any such advantage. When smallpox began to pop up in Dorset, Jesty decided to take drastic action. He took his family to a nearby farm with a cowpox-infected cow, scratched their arms, and wiped pus from the infected cow on the scratches. Over the next few days, their arms grew somewhat inflamed and they suffered the mild symptoms of cowpox — but it quickly passed. As the wave of smallpox passed through the town, none of the three were infected. Throughout the rest of their lives, through multiple waves of smallpox, they were immune.
The same technique would be popularized twenty years later by Edward Jenner, marking the first vaccine and the beginning of modern medicine. <•> The same wave of smallpox which ran across England in 1774 also made its way across Europe. In May, it reached Louis XV, King of France. Despite the wealth of a major government and the talents of Europe's most respected doctors, Louis XV died of smallpox on May 10, 1774.
The point: there is knowledge for which money cannot substitute. Even if Louis XV had offered a large monetary bounty for ways to immunize himself against the pox, he would have had no way to distinguish Benjamin Jesty from the endless crowd of snake-oil sellers and faith healers and humoral balancers. Indeed, top medical "experts" of the time would likely have warned him away from Jesty.
❝ "What Money Cannot Buy" by "johnswentworth" https:
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