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This map, designed to dramatize the global devastation of smallpox, visualizes the disease’s progress westward across continents and centuries. At its top, a sinister orange cloaked figure, personified as the face of smallpox, unfurls over the northern hemisphere, casting rays of infection across the globe. Trade routes and military paths are illustrated with galleons, camel caravans, and marching soldiers, each representing the conduits through which smallpox moved “from East to West… by caravans of traders and by travelers, by armies and by ships.”
India is labeled as the point of origin (“Smallpox began here”), while figures in Europe, Africa, and the Americas evoke the human toll of the disease. Key cities like Rome, Constantinople, and Boston are marked, and the visual sequence ends with smallpox’s arrival in the New World. Two inset globes and a central compass rose anchor the design. A caption at the bottom delivers the didactic moral: “Smallpox spread its cloak over the world, and was only checked at last by vaccination.”
Issued as part of Metropolitan Life’s widely circulated “Health Heroes” educational series, the map combines early twentieth-century graphic style with the moral clarity of Progressive-era public health messaging. It reduces a complex history of disease transmission to a vivid and memorable image, accessible to schoolchildren and adult readers alike.
![Amer. Sep. No. 19 & 20 [Partie du Groenland and Groenland Orientale]](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/19107.jpg)
