Nov 21– “Letter XI: On Inoculation” by François Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1733)
Summary: Smallpox inoculation was invented so harem slaves would have good skin.
Commentary: This one was weird. Jenner's much more interesting first hand account of his research went over much of the same info earlier in the year. I don't think there's been any other repeats like this. A lot of the reading is spent detailing how inoculation comes from the Circassians, who are a poor people with no economy other than selling their women to be harem slaves, and you can't have a pox marked harem slave, obviously.
The big thing here is the claim that this was literally the entire economy of Circassia. First, how do you have literally zero economic options, as an entire country/region/people, in the 1700s than selling your women into slavery. Couldn't you go be a poor farmer or something? Voltaire makes it sound like this was just a widespread standard transaction. I could see maybe selling your first daughter (sort of an inverse of the first son inheritance tradition) but no one minded that all their sisters, daughters, etc. were just getting shipped off? How do you even maintain your population? Did you just keep the ugly women? Doesn't that mean that you have an artificially high man to woman ratio?
It does appear to have been a real thing but I think Voltaire is probably exaggerating substantially.
On the other hand, anytime someone talks about the "hot alien slave species" trope in sci-fi, I can now say that, historically, it's not totally bullshit. Learning.
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