Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot about “Pox Parties”. The purpose of these parties is to expose a healthy child to the virus we call “chicken pox”, in order to avoid having to give the child a vaccination against this disease. It made me think about what “pox” used to refer to, and other older names for diseases.
Names of diseases, medical tools and terminology, are words and phrases that get changed over time. Every so often, a disease is renamed to something more accurate, based on newly discovered knowledge about the disease. Or, medical terms or conditions get a new name because the old name is now considered to be offensive.
Ultimately, this leads to a bunch of diseases or conditions that used to be called something that we would not recognize today. If you are curious, like me, then you can go online and scroll through genealogy dictionaries, or lists of old names for diseases, to learn more about what certain diseases used to be called. Genealogists will use these resources to get a better understanding of exactly what it was that an ancestor died from.
It seems fitting to start by looking up what the word “pox” used to mean. According to the dictionary of diseases at RootsWeb, the word “pox” once referred to the disease of syphilis. The word “pox” could also refer to “any unknown disease that caused sores to appear on the body”.
You have probably heard the old curse “A pox on you!”, or “a pox upon you!”. People who yelled these curses were targeting them at someone whom they were extremely displeased with, or whom they really didn’t like much at all. They were basically hoping that the person would break out in sores, endure great suffering, and die in agony. Perhaps that person severely wronged the curser in some significant way.
In the past, there probably wasn’t a cure for whatever “pox” a person had the misfortune of catching. People used to die from diseases that we have since discovered a cure for, or have created a vaccine against.
I find the concept of having a “Pox Party”, in 2011, to be both absurd, and potentially very dangerous. I’m sure our ancestors would be quite shocked if they learned that some of us were having, or considering having, a “party” that would intentionally spread a “pox” to children, today.
Image by Daniel Catt on Flickr