Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c6.s2.12

c6.s2.12

Another important point which emerges from Mr Holwell’s account of the Indian method of inoculation relates to the prevalence of some theory of bacterial infection amongst the mid-eighteenth century Indian inoculators. According to them: The small-pox is more or less epidemical, more mild or malignant, in proportion as the air is charged with these animalculae’, i.e. bacteria, and that these ‘adhere more closely, and in greater numbers, to glutinous, fat, and oily substances.’ That these ‘imperceptible animalculae floating in the atmosphere...are the cause of all epidemical diseases, but more particularly of the small-pox;’ that ‘they pass and repass in and out of the bodies of all animals in the act of respiration, without injury to themselves, or the bodies they pass through;’ but ‘such is not the case with those that are taken in with food,’ as these ‘are conveyed into the blood, where, in a certain time, their malignant juices excite a fermentation’ and end ‘in an eruption on the skin.’30