Dear Thomas Jefferson,

 Are you getting more comfortable with Zoom meetings?  When I went to my first Zoom, I did not want to turn on the video.  My thinking:  I certainly do not want to invite people into my office to look at me. 

Now I Zoom all of the time.  I have gotten very comfortable with meetings where I stay home, and all of the people appear on a glowing screen.  I don’t even think about how odd it is to be at a meeting where I just stare at my computer.  

During the Covid19 pandemic, most schools across the United States closed.  Students went to school, while they stayed at home.  It is very different from when you were tutored at home.  Now kids as young as five-years-old stare at their teacher on a glowing screen….and all of their classmates’ faces appear in neat little boxes.  It is a strange new world. 

I’m interested in hearing more about your experiences with Smallpox.  It was a tragic and often fatal disease until Edward Jenner developed a vaccine for it.  I have read that Jenner sent the vaccine directly to you so that you could vaccinate people at Monticello.  Did you do the vaccinations yourself?  How did you learn to administer shots?

I read that Dr. Sydenham recommended keeping the Smallpox patient very cold and administering twelve bottles of small beer every twenty-four hours.  Don’t you think that is quite a hefty amount of beer?  It was an unusual treatment, to say the least.  Were you ever aware of a doctor recommending that treatment, or had it gone out of favor long before the vaccine was discovered?

When you wrote to Jenner in 1806, you told him that you had taken an early part in recommending his vaccination to your countrymen. *1 Was that before or after Benjamin Waterhouse, professor of physics at Harvard, appointed you to be a vaccine agent in the National Vaccine Institute?  I am hoping you can tell me more about your role in that organization.  Can you also tell me how the organization was set up to implement a national vaccination program in the country?

We are still learning how to respond to this newest disease.  When we get together, I’ll tell you about some things that are now commonly heard in conversation and in the media.  We did not say these things very much before Covid19 hit the country.  Now we say words with new meanings all of the time.  Pandemic. Facemasks. Social distancing. Hand washing.  Plastic shields.  Contact tracing.  Online learning.  Remote learning.  In-person learning.  Small pods for learning.  Spikes.  Surges.  Variants. 

Send me your contact information, and I’ll send you a link to a Zoom meeting.  I want to hear more about Smallpox and Jenner’s vaccination.  You said his vaccination was the biggest single improvement in medicine.  You thought it had great utility.

I think you are going to be surprised when I tell you about some of the newest improvements in medicine today.

 

Sincerely,

Katy Dalgleish

  

*1  Thomas Jefferson, Writings: Autobiography, Notes on the State of Virginia, Public and Private Papers, Addresses, Letters, by Thomas Jefferson, Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, NY, 1984, 2011, pgs. 1162-1163