Infectious Diseases

Abstract

Despite the importance of diseases in human communities, there was little work on mathematical models for them until the beginning of the last century. An interesting exception is a paper by Daniel Bernoulli, written in 1760 and published in 1766, which analyses deaths from smallpox. It was aimed at influencing public policy towards variolation, a technique of injecting a mild strain of the smallpox virus to induce immunity against the full disease. This paper has similarities with Euler’s work on demography, published in 1760 and discussed in Chapter 1. The Euler and Bernoulli families were both from Basel, and Leonhard (born 1707) and Daniel (born 1700) knew each other as children. They both obtained chairs at the Russian Academy in St Petersburg under Catherine the Great in the 1720s and lived there together from 1727 until 1733, when Bernoulli returned to Basel, so it is possible that they corresponded about the mathematical modelling of human populations.