The Scar the World Forgot

On May 8, 1980, the Thirty-Third World Health Assembly declared in Geneva what no generation before had dared believe: smallpox — a disease that killed an estimated 300 million people in the twentieth century alone — was eradicated from the earth. That declaration was no single moment of triumph. It capped 184 years of perseverance that began when Edward Jenner vaccinated eight-year-old James Phipps in Berkeley, England, in 1796.…