(单词翻译:单击)
If you were, for whatever macabre reason, seeking the most catastrophic moment in the history of humankind, you might well settle on this:
如果你正在寻找人类历史上最灾难性的时刻，无论出于何种骇人的原因，你很可能会选择这样一个时刻：
About 10,000 years ago, as people first began to domesticate animals and farm the land in Mesopotamia, India, and northern Africa, a peculiar virus leaped across the species barrier.
大约一万年前，当人们在美索不达米亚、印度和北非开始驯养动物、耕种土地时，一种特殊的病毒跨越了物种壁垒。
Little is known about its early years.
人们对这种病毒早期的情况知之甚少。
But the virus spread and, whether sooner or later, became virulent.
但这种病毒后来传开了，而且早晚都会夺去性命。
It ransacked internal organs before traveling through the blood to the skin, where it erupted in pus-filled lesions.
这种病毒先洗劫内脏，然后通过血液传播到皮肤，最后皮肤表面会突然冒出满是脓液的病变。
Many of those who survived it were left marked, disfigured, even blind.
许多从中幸存下来的人留了疤痕，容貌尽毁，甚至失明。
As civilizations bloomed across the planet, the virus stalked them like a curse.
当各种文明在地球上蓬勃发展时，这种病毒就像一个诅咒一样尾随着他们。
Some speculate that it swept through ancient Egypt, where its scars appear to mar the mummified body of Pharaoh Ramses V.
一些人推测，这种病毒曾在古埃及肆虐，病毒留下的伤疤似乎损毁了法老拉美西斯五世的木乃伊。
By the fourth century A.D., it had gained a foothold in China.
到了公元4世纪，这种病毒在中国站稳了脚跟。
Christian soldiers spread it through Europe during the 11th- and 12th-century Crusades.
在11世纪和12世纪十字军东征期间，基督教士兵将其传播到了欧洲。
In the early 1500s, Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors conveyed it west across the Atlantic, where it ravaged native communities and contributed to the downfall of the Aztec, Mayan, and Inca empires.
在16世纪早期，西班牙和葡萄牙征服者横跨大西洋将病毒向西传播，这种病毒在西边的土著群落肆虐，并导致阿兹特克、玛雅和印加帝国的衰落。
By the end of the 1500s, the disease caused by the virus had become one of the most feared in the world.
到16世纪末，由这种病毒引起的疾病已经发展为世界上最可怕的疾病之一。
About a third of those who contracted it were dead within weeks.
大约三分之一的感染者会在几周内丧命。
The Chinese called it tianhua, or “heaven’s flowers.”
中国人称这种病毒为“天花”，意为“天上之花”。
Throughout Europe, it was known as variola, meaning “spotted.”
整个欧洲将其称为“痘斑”，意为 “斑点”。
In England, where doctors used the term pox to describe pestilent bumps on the skin, syphilis had already claimed the name “the great pox.”
英国医生用“痘疱”一词来形容皮肤上的致命肿块，而梅毒就被称为“大痘疱”。
And so this disease took on a diminutive moniker that belied the scale of its wretchedness: smallpox.
因此，这种疾病有了一个与其悲惨程度不符的小小绰号：小痘疱。
Over time, different communities experimented with different cures.
随着时间的推移，不同的群落尝试了不同的治疗方法。
Many noticed that survivors earned lifetime immunity from the disease.
许多人注意到，幸存者获得了对这种疾病的终身免疫力。
This discovery was passed down through the generations in Africa and Asia, where local cultures developed a practice that became known as inoculation—from the Latin inoculare, meaning “to graft.”
非洲和亚洲将这一发现代代相传，当地文化发展出了一种被称为人痘接种(inoculation源于拉丁语inocare, 意为“嫁接”)的疗法。
In most cases, people would stick a sharp instrument into a smallpox-infected pustule to collect just a little material from the disease.
在大多数情况下，人们会将尖锐的器械刺入天花感染者的脓疱中，收集一些天花物质。
Then they would stick the same blade, wet with infection, into the skin of a healthy individual.
然后，他们用同一沾有感染病毒的刀刃，刺入一个健康人的皮肤上。
Inoculation often worked—pustules would form at the injection site, and a low-grade version of the disease would typically follow.
人痘接种法通常有疗效——身体注射部位会先形成脓疱，随后这种疾病的低级版本会找上门。
But the intervention was terribly flawed; it killed about one in every 50 patients.
但这种干预疗法存在严重缺陷; 每50名患者中就会有1名患者丧命。
