The conquest of the New World led to many changes in our history and opened a gateway to a vast acreage of land to be explored, conquered and colonized. In 1492 Columbus stumbled across the greatest discovery of his time, the New World. Here he found many things, a race of people never before seen. A vast number of plants, spices, mammals, birds, and fish exotic to the other side of the earth. However, the most important thing to effect would me that of disease and more importantly smallpox.
The most deadly and influential disease to hit the New World would without a doubt have to be the smallpox. A disease which, within a few days it could "transform a healthy man into a pustled, oozing horror, whom his closest relatives can barely recognize" (Columbian Exchange 56).
Smallpox is considered "an old companion of humanity" (Columbian Exchange 44) and for the better part of the last millennium was one of the most common disease to plague man. Smallpox is transmitted "through the air by means of droplets or dust particles" (44) and enters its host through the respiratory tract. The "patient suffers from high fever and vomiting followed three or fours days later by the characteristic skin eruptions" (46). Thos lucky enough the live through disease are left with small pox or "dents" across their skin.
In the communities it reached it left devastating impacts. It is a very "steady" and "dependable killer" which has a mortality rate of about 30% of all who are infected by it. (44). Around the new years of 1519 the disease had reached the Indians of Santo Domingo and is recorded to have killed one-third to one-half of the entire population. Las Casa, an early Spanish conquistador, states that "it left no more than one thousand alive of that immensity of people that was on this island and which we have seen with our own lives" (47). The spread of smallpox can also attribute to the fall of the Aztec empire.
