Dr. George Moore was a young public health worker who was among the first westerners sent to Nepal in 1952. He found a nation that was very backward. There was only one hospital, and that was for the royalty. Life expectancy was 35 years. Ninety-eight percent of the population never had any medical treatment in their short lives—no doctors or medicine, ever.

Moore and his colleague began by attacking malaria, a devastating killer, by spraying the inside of huts with insecticide. But their second major challenge, smallpox, was more difficult. Smallpox vaccine must be refrigerated, and in the early 1950s, there was no way to get refrigerators to primitive villages.

Then Moore struck on a plan. He finally got a small batch of vaccine from the U. S. and stored it in the small kerosene refrigerator at his base camp. Then, using that vaccine, he inoculated some small boys, and took those boys with him to the villages.

When someone is inoculated with smallpox vaccine, they get a very mild case of the disease—too mild to make them sick, but strong enough to give them permanent immunity. They also develop a smallpox blister at the point of the injection.

So, Dr. Moore brought the vaccinated boys with him to the villages. Then he would break their smallpox blister, dip the end of a string into the blister, and then touch that infected string to a small opening in the skin of the person he wanted to protect. And that was how the assault on the killer disease was begun.