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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (172171)	10/7/2005 7:08:37 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 281500

Carl, with women having only a couple of children each, compared with 10 each in bygone eras, there is definitely going to be a LOT less carnage as there is not the surplus of males to kill off in territorial genocidal conflict. There's no more Malthusian problem to be solved. Contraception has done it. As you say, it has been quite peaceful lately. Mqurice

To: Bilow who wrote (172171)	10/8/2005 3:56:04 PM
From: Sam	Respond to of 281500

Estimates of death by smallpox in the 20th C vary pretty dramatically. Though all of the estimates are very large: 300,000,000-500,000,000. Here is an interesting page, with citations: Deaths by Mass Unpleasantness: Estimated Totals for the Entire 20th Century users.erols.com BTW,Your source on smallpox says, "On May 14, 1796, Jenner took material from cowpox on the hand of milkmaid Sarah Nelm and inoculated it into the arm of young James Phipps. Jenner then deliberately exposed Phipps to smallpox – and Phipps didn’t get it! With the solid success of using cowpox (the virus is called vaccinia), “vaccination” was born." Actually, smallpox vaccinations were common in Africa and the Ottoman Empire prior to the 18th century--it came to England around 1730-1740 or so through the wife of an English ambassador to Turkey, who had here own children vaccinated. She was derided by doctors and others when she first brought it back. It made no "sense" to some of them, and to others it was interfering with God's plans for human beings. The same arguments were used in the US when Cotton Mather used it after a smallpox outbreak in Boston in the early 1720s, having learned about it from some African slaves.