i am reading Richard Preston's The Demon in The Freezer --which is about smallpox-- and 2 words jumped out..
P.35
....a sweet, sickly, cloying odor drifted into the hallway.
It was not like anything the medical staff at the hospital had ever encountered before. It was not a smell of decay, for his skin was sealed. The pus within the skin was throwing off gases that defused out of his body. In those days, it was called the foetor of smallpox. Doctors today call it the odor of a cytokine storm.

p. 36
.... along with a stench coming through the skin, like something nasty inside a paper bag.(refering to the foetor)

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p. 36
In 1875, Dr. William Osler was the attending physician in the smallpox wards of the Montreal General Hospital. He called the agent that caused the sweet smell of smallpox a 'virus', which is latin for poison. In Osler's day, no one knew what a virus was, but Osler knew the smell of this one. When there were few or no pustules on the skin, he would sniff at the patients's wrists and forehead, and he could smell the foetor of the virus and it helped him nail down a diagnosis.

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i am guessing that foeter is related to the word fell as in felon/fallen... but there are enough doctors here abouts--if any can information--it would be interesting.

but i suspect some are too, too young to know.. NYC as a major port of entry required smallpox vaccinations up until 1974--most places didn't require them much after 1970--unless traveling outside of the country.

i only remember the date, because my son born in 1973 was required to get one as part of his 'normal innoculations', (along with polio, DPT, etc) but my daughter didn't. i got my last one in 1970--i was traveling out of the country, and the he (the patient) in the first paragraph is about a case in europe in 1970...

i didn't know the origins of virus...and thought it interesting... (i do know that both some bactreria and virus's 'make you sick' by creating protiens that are toxic... some don't cause a lot of 'infection' (ie, pus) but do their damage as almost a side effect... (just as early plants excreted oxogen, (and changed the atmosphere in a way positive for us) but deadly to many organizism.)



my other obsession