ABSTRACT
To many nineteenth-century British medical officers smallpox was 'the scourge of India'. Reputedly 'one of the most violent and severe diseases to which the human race is liable', smallpox was held responsible for 'more victims than all other diseases combined', outstripping even cholera and plague in its 'tenacity and malignity'.2 Several million deaths in the late nineteenth century alone were attributed to its destructive powers. Fatal in a third of all cases, smallpox also resulted in the permanent scarring and disfigurement of many of its survivors: one estimate blamed the disease for threequarters of the blindness in India.3
