Plus Ça Change – September 2, 2026
Plus Ça Change – Vaccination
September 2, 2026
When I was writing Laveaux: Dancer, I had a scene in a slave pen (euphemistically a slave depot). I wanted a description of what one was like in New Orleans. After much digging I found the memoir of Solomon Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave. Yes, that one. He has a precise description of a slave pen in New Orleans.
By random happenstance, it was the very one I had chosen for my scene. So, although he was enslaved 20+ years later, I had a first-hand account of what that specific place was like. See A Slave Pen by Any Name… and Twelve Years a Slave and Synchronicity.
History: Solomon Northrup was a free man of color, kidnapped and shipped to New Orleans to be sold into slavery. He arrived in New Orleans on May 23, 1841 on the brig Orleans. He had not been vaccinated against smallpox. On the trip to New Orleans he was infected. The first symptoms appeared (reading his memoir carefully and cross referencing with other primary sources–I found the “manifest” of the 44 people shipped as slaves/cargo on that voyage) on the morning of May 26, 1841. He was diagnosed, then treated at the Charity Hospital by (in his words) a Doctor Carr.
Narrative: I am quite confident this was Dr. Josias Kerr, uncle to Marie Laveaux. In Laveaux: Mother it is now 1841, and here we are. I’ve wanted to get Solomon into the story ever since I discovered the marvelous coincidence that a member of the family treated him for smallpox.
All well and good, time to do the last bit of research. What symptoms does smallpox present before the rash. What herbal/natural treatments might there be for those symptoms. Who else is there, who’s running the pen, all those good things. A good lot of that will appear in the story.
Oh, and vaccination. I know it’s a thing, has been for 40+ years. This is more curiosity. Because (whether true or not I have no idea) Marie and Dr. Kerr are vaccinated against smallpox, and it’s too late for Solomon Northrup. So none of what follows will make it into the story, but it gives you a sense for life circa 1840.
Circa 1800 Edward Jenner figured out that exposure to cowpox protects you from smallpox. He experimented to confirm, it worked. He developed a means of vaccination. The initial vaccination for smallpox required live cowpox virus, at a time when there was no refrigeration.
The only available incubator was another person, a situation that lasted decades. When vaccinated, a blister forms. Fluid from that blister is used to innoculate the next person. Who develops a blister… and on down the chain, arm to arm: called Jennerian Vaccination. To get live vaccine across the Atlantic, The Balmis Expedition (1803) used 22 orphaned children. The boys were vaccinated in pairs, and as one developed blisters, the fluid was taken to inoculate the next pair. In other circumstances, slaves formed the human chain. It was the only vaccine, and this is how it crossed oceans. There is no doubt that the end result was immensely effective. Hundreds of thousands of people were vaccinated against a deadly disease. But to get there, powerless people were intentionally infected to bring the live virus to a new continent.
Once established, there was a market for blister pus and scabs, “vaccine matter,” but it had a very short shelf-life. Fresh mattered.
