The ‘Smallpox War’ on the Kimberley Diamonds Fields in the mid-1880s

Abstract

The impact of smallpox on early Cape colonial society has always been a point of debate among scholars,and as a result has tended to be either exaggerated or understated2. An outbreak in Kimberley during the mid- 1880s3 became contentious when doctors disagreed on whether or not the virus was smallpox. Dr Leander Starr Jameson suggested that the virus was phemphigus4, while Dr Hans Sauer believed it to be genuine smallpox (variola). The argument was soon complicated by the involvement of influential diamond capitalists such as Cecil John Rhodes, and the resulting cover-up attracted such attention that it led, in the words of Hans Sauer,to the 'greatest medical scandal in the long and honourable history of British medicine'.5A although the episode is documented, most scholars have either made cursor~reference to its importance or devoted only a few paragraphs to it. In revisiting an event that Edmund Burrows called the 'most diabolic usesto which the medical profession was put', this article reinvestigates an episode of 'deception' and denial in the history of the medical professionat the Cape.