Larry Brilliant - Sometimes Brilliant

A t the heart of this book are two interwoven miracles.

The first miracle occurred in the middle of the Cold War, when doctors from more than two dozen countries including Russia and America set aside their enmity and fought alongside each other to defeat a common foe that had killed billions of children over millenniasmallpox.

The second miracle was that a young hippie doctor living in a Himalayan ashram was sent by his teacher, an old Indian guru, to work for the United Nations and be part of the campaign to eradicate this disease. The guru predicted, Smallpox will be quickly eradicated. This is Gods gift to mankind because of the hard work of dedicated health workers.

Less than three years later, all naturally occurring Variola major, killer smallpox, was gone.

Forty years ago, I was that hippie doctor. It is long past time for me to tell you about these miracles as I experienced them.

My memory is not clear enough to recall events as vividly as I would like but I have tried my best to capture the spirit of what really happened while trying to balance the effects of the passage of so much time. I have placed quotation marks around conversations I participated in directly or heard from trustworthy sources, but I dont pretend to remember word for word conversations from forty years ago; details have surely been modified by the passage of time. Conversations with my teacher Neem Karoli Baba, the guru who opened my heart, were often in Hindi and were translated mostly by Ravi Khanna, Dada Mukerjee, or by my wife, Girija, or me as our Hindi improved. We recorded many of these conversations each day in our spiritual diaries. And we wrote down every word of his improbable prediction the day he made it. Lest we get it wrong, we sent it out to dozens of our friends soon after.

The reporting on the smallpox campaign is accurate: its sourced, researched, and drawn from my own experiences in the field, the actual World Health Organization (WHO) files, the numerous reports I wrote for WHO, both my own and my wifes contemporaneous diaries, and the academic book I wrote on the subject when I was a professor at the University of Michigan, shortly after smallpoxs eradication (The Management of Smallpox Eradication in India), as well as confirmation from the incredible men and women alongside whom I worked, shoulder-to-shoulder. Thankfully, many are still around to hold my feet to the factual fire. You will find additional sources on the history of smallpox and its eradication at the end of the book in the Further Reading section, on page 413. I hope you will read some of them to get a broader view of the miracle of the campaign.

In this book I have retained the Indian geographical names as we used them on our reports and epidemiological maps in the 1970s. Cities and jurisdictions are referred to by the names they were called at the time. Bombay instead of Mumbai, for example, and Calcutta instead of Kalighat, Chotanagpur instead of Jharkhand, Kumaon instead of Uttarakhand. This archaic nomenclature is not intended to disrespect Indias rapid modernization but to reflect the journey taken at that time.

The people I write about are real people, but some of the names have been changed in order to prevent unnecessary embarrassment to individuals whose identification might cause pain to their families. In some cases, their actions were questionable.

For any mistakes I might have made regarding names and dates, and wherever I have failed to adequately thank those who were due more credit, I apologize in advance. Forgive me, too, for failing to include the names of the thousands of public health heroesdoctors, vaccinators, search workers, and volunteerswho worked on the program. I so wish I could memorialize every man, woman, and child sickened or killed by smallpox. To do them real justice would require a library, an archive, a monument.

As I retell some of these stories today, they sometimes strain even my own credulity, but as my father often said, before launching into one of his own intriguing tales, It is a great story, and it has the extra, additional, incremental benefit of being true.