Hub of Reason

LangLangC

00:45

One interesting factoid about the language usage. It seems speculative how some writers retro-reason about the etymological development:

> The seemingly inappropriate ‘small pocks’ (later small-pox and then smallpox) was coined in the late fifteenth century to distinguish the disease from the ‘great pox’ of syphilis, one of the bounties brought home from South America by Columbus’ sailors. Terrible though it was, smallpox was an established fact of life in Europe so the new curse of syphilis – mutilation, paralysis and a lingering death – may well have seemed a bigger threat.

fredsbend

01:12

@Oddthinking DevSolar seemed to not get this in his comments under Lang's answer on the small pox question.

Which seemed a major cause for his criticism of Lang's answer.

Small pox is a disease. The idea that an individual virus causes it is a new understanding of this disease and thus, the focus of Lang's answer.

@Oddthinking This, I didn't get from Dev's criticisms.

fredsbend

01:50

@LangLangC Happened to me hard on ars. They're vicious over there. Very smart, very skilled, very vicious people.

I've never rage quit a forum ... until ars.

Oddthinking

06:58

@LangLangC: Okay, I want to move past the following topics: What people are apparently accusing you of, whether HIV causes AIDS, vaccinations, whether you have sinister plans, Australopithecus, tropes and comparative etymologies.

What I am interested in is that there is 3,588 words in an answer, and I still don't understand what it says. It shouldn't need to take more than about 250 words to explain the key concepts, especially because the key facts don't seem to be in dispute.

> Yes. In the sense of: what we think of when we say "smallpox" seems to be of quite recent origin.

just means "Modern smallpox is more virulent and fatal than earlier descriptions.", right?

> And from a quite eurocentric perspective, so far.

Not only do I not understand what it means and I can't see how it is supported, but it seems inflammatory and irrelevant. Lose that entire angle, and focus on the question.

Your first medical definition of smallpox is very much a medical definition, defined by its effects on humans. But the claim seems to be a far more biological one - looking at the DNA of a particular virus. So, you seem to be saying "Oh, the ancestors don't count as smallpox, because they didn't have (or perhaps just weren't recognised to have) the same effect", where the biologists would see a line of evolution.

At some point one could argue an ancestor is no longer smallpox, but proto-smallpox, but that line is entirely arbitrary, and basing an answer on that is arbitrary.

> Since only German seems to be the one true language of scientific precision

That's a silly statement, and you should remove it.

> Of note: the "Creighton, the contemporary," was a most prominent antivaccinator! Now, that doesn't mean that "antivaccinators are always right". Or that he had even many useful ideas. It just proves that in portraying the historical development of the post-17th century disease, this prominent anti-vaccinator was proven right for this special tidbit:

This can all be removed without affecting the answer in the slightest.

From much of your answer, I get that it wasn't clear to ancient physicians that all these sick people were suffering from one small set of related viruses and it wasn't clear that all these other sick people were suffering from a a different set of causes. That can be summarised in a sentence - it isn't germane to the question.

> mass inoculation with live smallpox, carried the risk of engendering an epidemic.

Was anyone suggesting innoculation with live smallpox? Jenner used Cowpox. Later they used Vaccinia.

LangLangC

08:50

@Oddthinking Thx for the feedback. But this line is utterly surprising for me. Why is that inflammatory?

LangLangC

09:07

@Oddthinking No, that's backwards. The medical definition of disease is "about a specific set of symtoms, a specific…" And as such eradicated smallpox and eradicated strain are one package – for the modern period. That definition doesn't really fit the older strains that disappeared in favour of/earlier than the more virulent modern strain.

Ancestor may "count as some kind of proto-pox" but the claim is that "what we eradicated exactly is of recent origin" (ie non-proto). Where is the arbitrariness in that?

It is inexact to backproject the modern medical definition to ancient Egypt and trying to find there 'smallpox', as the strain eradicated wasn't there, and the described effects weren't there in that quality. I corroborate the problematic back projection of the modern definition to Ramses times and present evidence for milder forms of illnesses from a range of agents, including pox-viruses before the middle ages.

The other answer goes exactly wrong in that part, using a quote that doesn't emphasise the first bit, but wrongly the second of the first sentence. It presents Ramses as evidence. That is at once highly disputed at all, but look at images of his head yourself. If he died from something that also affected his facial skin then it is hardly amatch for the fotos on Wikipedia?

@Oddthinking I thought it important that previously the medical definitions were not as unique for any of those illnesses for one, showing that ancients could diagnose eg diabetes with precision but not pox-like diseases, making it as difficult for them as for historians to find the disease in the sources. And second that it is another hint at pox-caused illness was just not as vicious as 18th century smallpox?

But more importantly: That also means that people weren't not only suffering from a set of related viruses. As I tried to show at least here in chat: pestis plague, leprosy, chickenpox (not a pox virus!) and measles were often lumped into one and the same category. Finding (pre-)medieval images of smallpox sufferers is very difficult to say the least. Written sources or biological remains are easier to relate to smallpox-like. But not as 'optmistic' as presented elsewhere.

The first pox host jump may have been very long ago. But that didn't conquer the globe/known world. So the goal for the answer is that the biological finding from the claim matches the modern medical definition and the firm history. And that it contradicts the overly optimistic backprojection of the modern disease being (such a devastating) scourge since 10000 years based on more flimsy history and archaeology.

LangLangC

12:24

Now, after finishing re-read of several of the ancient sources (like Razi) it is ever so more intriguing why my answer was met with such a fan of opposition. As the Razi description is clearly of varied quality regarding the symptoms to look for.

> Bodies that are lean, bilious, hot, and dry, are more disposed to the Measles^ than to the Small- Pox; and **if they are seized Avith the Small-Pox, the pustules are necessarily either few in number, distinct, and favorable, or, on the contrary, very bad, numerous, sterile, and dry, with putrefaction, and no maturation.***
(3.) Lastly,thosebodiesthatareleananddry,andofacold
temperament, are neither disposed to the Small-Pox nor to the Measles and if they ***are seized with the Small-Pox, the pustules are few, favorable, moderate, mild, without danger, and with a moderate light fever from …

Now compare that with a more cautious speculation about disease origins:

> The question of what caused smallpox was always intriguing and became the object for various legends and myths [3,7]. Despite the distinct characteristic features of smallpox that distinguish it from the other diseases, descriptions of this disease are absent from the written sources of ancient civilizations, such as the Bible and Talmud. Currently, most researchers regard smallpox descriptions in the Charaka Samhita and Sushruta Samhita, which are ancient Indian treatises, as the first reliable descriptions. These medical texts had been compiled by the 1st–4th centuries of the Common Era…

I am open to refactoring the answer. And I was open to criticism from comments. One was that a quote "dragged in vaccination", another that the "reasoning was circular" (actually confirming what I wrote: modern definition is not – far from – easily applicable for old 'cases' of the historical record?). But this is allegedly all disproven because an imprecise word existed in English & German (but meant earlier just 'pustules').

From our exchange here I gather that I can safely ignore all this comment criticism?

Oddthinking

12:48

@LangLangC I am not saying the other criticism is right or wrong. I am not saying it can ignored. I am saying it can all be avoided by not straying off into areas that have nothing to do with the question, and focussing the answer into addressing the claim.

Vaccination has nothing to do with the claim.

Ramses has nothing to do with the claim.

Razi has nothing to do with the claim.

Ancient Indian treatises have nothing to do with the claim.

@LangLangC So you admit the older strains have disappeared? That is the claim. Address it.

@LangLangC It is inexact. So don't do that. Don't mention Ancient Egyptian diagnoses. It isn't relevant.

LangLangC

13:08

@Oddthinking But that is the necessary context to why the claim is notable in the first place! "Oh, SP strain eradicated is of very recent origin? How can that be, as it (diseaes and(/or?) virus frequently portrayed as one of humanities' oldest companions?" Answer: because if we go back more than 500 years it gets very inexact and many portays of the history of smallpox just lump any hint of 'must be that SP into one narrative! That is torpedoed by the claim, once more.

So I figure that an answer might address 1 why is it notable 2 is that finding true, 3 is it true/accurate how the claim is repeated?

1 needs that explanation that virus and disease are different thing and both can change (and that things like Ramses and Razi are not as conclusive as some might want them) 2 benefits from similar research from different sources converging (whether historical accounts, medical texts or latest molecular research) 3 needs just a reading aid for the inexact shortening of the secondary headline from claim, as apparently it's maby not "in dispute" as you say, but evidently confusing (look at us here)

And I repeat: it is not I who 'dragged vaccination" into it. The claim itself does:

> The findings, published in the journal Current Biology, raise new questions about the role smallpox may have played in human history and fuels a longstanding debate over when the virus that causes smallpox, variola, first emerged and later evolved in response to inoculation and vaccination.

LangLangC

13:32

@Oddthinking We seem to read that claim quite differently. You seem to focus on other strains of which zero descendant material is available, thus marking the focus on that as "address the speculative" part. What we do have are very murky accounts from pre1500 history and no biology to connect it to reliably other than by looking at very distant relatives and back-calculating genetics. That looks to me much more complicated to bring across to readers?

Oddthinking

16:16

We must be reading the claim very differently, because:
1) I look at the quoted claim in the question and see no mention of vaccination. I don't see while you would want to be distracted by it.

2) The answer "because if we go back more than 500 years it gets very inexact" isn't an an answer to the claim. Sure it gets very inexact, but the question is about the smallpox we can detect. It seems really unlikely that several samples taken a few hundred years apart have a most recent common ancestor so recent, and yet it seems that everyone involved in the discussion agrees that is the case. Whether some dude in two thousand years ago died of varicella virus or not isn't relevant.

At least 3,000 words of your 3,500 word answer aren't relevant to the claim making it very difficult for anyone to understand. If a reader is better off not reading your answer to find out whether the claim is true, but going and searching themselves, we have a problem.

LangLangC

17:49

I think it a good practice to read the entire source for the claim. No one knows whether OP rips it out of context, quotes correctly, or whatever.
In there it is, and reading the entire source makes clear that the one *incomplete* sentence quote used is relevant to the claim.

The disagreement I do see is that historical data I present *is disputed* with bold face in comments. And coincidentally in the other answer that uses bold face to redraw uncertainties of a quote as unquestionable facts.
Of course I could shorten the A to answering the exact question in claim: "Is there evidence for that?" "Yes. The End." But that's not only 'too short' for Skeptics, but *also* disputed ('the dude from 3000 years ago died of VARV smallpox'):

> Smallpox itself (as a contagious disease symptomized by fever, skin lesions, and high mortality) is *much older* than 1580.

Thus: should I reduce exactness and explanation to "Yo. Smallpox did not exist before at all"? Surely a popular phrasing for votes and readership, simple enough. Almost correct, if one knows how to read the science and what the concepts used mean.

I tried to avoid that oversimplification with nuanced explanation, increasing length, and still get blasted by the knights of nay.

That thing is complicated and needs breaking down. If SE readers do not know definitions of disease, of which there are more than one, the answer needs to say which is used, and why. If I just throw in "Pox disease w…

If the three steps and points from this are all irrelevant for the claim, then I do not see a claim to begin with.

The most central confusion produced by the claim is not only: are the findings correct?
They are. Well, as good as genetic science goes, and as limited.

The most central confusion produced by the claim is: why? how can that even be, as popular accounts of smallpox history and vaccination triumph paints a thousands of years old killer virus that has always been the angel of 30%-certain death that catched everyone in sight. The 'eternal' scourge of mankind finally eradicated in 1977 and declared gone in 1980. Getting such a pox-virus was never nice. But before the one MRCA evolved into what we found in claim, it was never on that scale for quality and quantity either.

If I fail get this across, and it seems I failed even here in chat with much more words than in the answer, the answer might need deletion. But i personally would then also plead for removal of the entire Q&A. The whole topic appears to be too complicated fro SkepticsSE?

If you see a way to get this picture down to 500 words or less without leaving out the relevant parts, go ahead. Either edit mine or post your own.

Nostradamus

19:51

1

Q: Where should quote-hunting questions go?

Skeptics.SE regularly receives on-topic questions of the form "Did Person X say Quote Y?" The answers fall into a few categories: Yes, they said it at Event Z. No, Person A said it, at Event Z. There's no evidence Person X said it. That last one has an obvious follow-up question: "Who said ...

Sklivvz

20:11

FINALLY

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