“I’d like to say something about coronavirus,” area resident Truman Felix said at the Edson town hall meeting November 9. A regular attendee of the monthly Edson township meetings, Felix addressed those present towards the end of formal business, in an address hearkening back to the past, in Europe and at Valley Forge. The first example set in Medieval Europe was a person named Anna.

“She was 80 years old, and she knew there was no money in it,” he said, but had answered the call from medieval officials struggling with a smallpox outbreak.

“And they (the officials) said, ‘whatever you do, do your thing.’” he shared Monday.

“And she said, I need a little sack of some pennies, which were silver dollars, and I need to go to where the smallpox is at its worst,” he said, going on. “So, down to the village where smallpox is at its worst. And she pulls out a thimble and she was squeezing that puss,” he said of the distinctive pustules that once killed one in three of those who got smallpox. “She gave everybody a silver dollar so they were happy to see her of course,” he said. “Up to the castle, lined all the kids up, and she scratched on their arm until blood came, and she put a drop of that puss on, and she put a bandage on it,” Felix said, concluding, “She vaccinated them. That’s all a vaccine is to this day.” Although the first official smallpox vaccine was developed in 1796 by Edward Jenner, the principle had been known before. The next example given by Felix was from Valley Forge during the American War of Independence.

“Next story, Valley Forge,” he shared. “This was George Washington and he was a pretty good general, but he had a fair understanding of health too, and he was experimenting,” Felix said of the commander who suffered smallpox in the West Indies for three weeks in his early life, before commanding the fledgling U.S. Army. “There were different groups going through, and they had little epidemics going through. This one guy got sick, and in two days he snapped out of it. And he (Washington) said, ‘that’s the guy I want, come over here.’” Working with the man on a strictly voluntary basis, Washington then asked for and got “about half a dixie cup full of blood” out of the man who beat the disease quickly, bloodletting then a big practice.

“This is the guy who got sick, beat it, snapped out of it, ok,” Felix said of the blood donor with strong antibodies. Washington told the soldiers “this is an experiment,” and proceeded to place some blood under a flap of skin with each soldier, which Felix said was “75 percent effective.” The primitive immunity experiment helped give American soldiers fighting in the Continental Army a chance against their English opponents, who had built-in exposure immunity to smallpox that the Continental Army lacked. Proactive defense measures against disease helped keep the Continental Army fighting, going on to win at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781 and finish with the Treaty of Paris in 1783, granting the 13 colonies independence.

Felix’s third and final example of medical history was from New York, where he said Irish moving out of an area rife with infectious disease were replaced by a large Jewish community. Different sanitary practices regarding waste (enshrined in Jewish law and also protecting Jews from the Black Death in Europe) meant that the new arrivals didn’t have the same disease or mortality rate as those who had preceded them.

“So what I’m sharing with you guys, is that there were people here before us, who had to deal with this,” Felix said, going on with a positive example of spread in how fish eggs that he said stuck to geese feet were transplanted to places they otherwise wouldn’t or shouldn’t be given the conditions. As one example, he brought up the story of a waterfilled gravel pit where the grandson of a man who had helped put fish into the pit caught a bluegill.

“We never put bluegills in there,” the man named Peterson had said. “He might not of, but the geese did,” Felix said. Or as was once said toward the end of Jurassic Park, ‘Life will find a way,’ come the morning.

Staff photo.