Less words are accentuated. The tilde is being lost in many of them, which leads us to remember that Greguería de Ramón Gómez de la Serna where he defined the accent as the vaccine of the word. Already put, you just have to ask where the word vaccine comes from.
To do this, we have to go back to the 18th century with the help of British writer Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), who discovered the solution to eradicate smallpox disease. It was during a trip to Türkiye, in 1717, when he noticed how mothers inoculated smallpox to the children to protect them against a disease from which little or nothing was known. This prophylaxis technique is called variolation. In this way, the apparently magical secrets – but of scientific root – were discovered before Mary, whose letters from the other face of the world aroused the admiration of the intellectuality of the time, in addition to inspiring the orientalism of painters as entrance. The aforementioned letters have been collected in Spanish by the Editorial La Línea del Horizon under the title: Letters from Istanbul.
For those who want to immerse yourself in the narrow streets of Istanbul, with their bazaars and mosques, as well as in the Turkish baths and the harems of the time, its reading is very appropriate. However, the most important thing – regarding scientific information – is found in the smallpox remedy, a disease that Mary Wortley Montagu had suffered in her own skin. But the most painful thing for her was the loss of her brother because of that disease.
The Royal Family, interested in the variolation, financed an experimental study. The guinea pigs, in this case, were inmates of the Newgate prison who were inoculated by the virus in exchange for granting them freedom. The experiment was a success. But much earlier, let’s put centuries, the Chinese have already applied the technique of the variolación, dried scabs of people with smallpox and then sniff the resulting dust. It is not that it did not affect them, what happened is that the smallpox they developed was low intensity and survived it, providing them with immunity for the rest of their lives.
With regard to Western inoculation, it was carried out in the arm, where a cut was made, in which the content of the pustule of a sick person was applied. But it was not until 1796 when the first modern vaccine saw the light thanks to the English doctor Edward Jenner and Sarah Nelmes, the cows milking that appeared in her consultation with the typical brands of the bovine smallpox. To the clinical picture she presented, tenths of fever and constant headaches were added. It was then that Dr. Jenner put into practice something that had been around the head for a long time, applying the content of Sarah Nelmes pustules in an eight -year -old boy who had not yet suffered the disease. And there all began.
Because, at first, the child suffered a slight reaction and weeks later, the doctor again inoculate smallpox, but this time of a person without presenting any reaction. As immunity was achieved thanks to the cows, from them the word “vaccine” was created to call the remedy. From then on – as Gomez de la Serna pointed out in another of his Greguerías – the cows write with the inkwell of their eyes the poem of resignation.
The stone ax It is a section where Montero Glezwith the will of prose, it exercises its particular siege to scientific reality to state that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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