>Lord Jeffrey Amherst distributed blankets with smallpox virus to Indians as intentional germ warfare
>During the Seven Years' War
>1756-1763
>Supposedly there are other instances of whites giving Indians smallpox blankets well before 1860?
>Germ theory wasn't accepted until Pasteur in the 1860s
DA FUQ? This seems, at least superficially, like an enormous contradiction, germ warfare before germ theory. The two reasons I won't write it off is that firstly the Mongols used plague corpses and catapulted them into cities (or at least that's what I learned in world history) and Edward Jenner used, in 1770, cowpox "material" to intentionally infect children for the first European vaccinations.
By "material" it means he made a small cut on the arms of a few kids and rubbed cowpox pus on it.
Anyways, that lesser infection of cowpox gave immunity to the much more lethal smallpox. While this might suggest everyone understood smallpox could be spread by coming in contact with pus (by spreading it on a blanket, perhaps) it might also be the case that Jenner was the first to realize this. Then again, Mongols were using plague corpses to spread disease 500 years before that, at least that'd my understanding.
Is this bullshit? Did Western Europeans practice germ warfare, or was mostly a "happy accident" for the Europeans that their potential foes died of disease? I have also heard that tuberculosis was brought to the Injuns by seals: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28871719
Let's be clear, at best intentional "germ warfare" accounted for a ridiculously small portion of the otherwise inevitable spread of disease. Nonetheless, this is a talking point frequently brought up by self-hating Marxists, I mean useful-idiot liberals, so I'm curious if it's true or not.