Biographical Focus: Jeffrey Amherst, the first biowarrior

by philg

It’s Sunday, a time for looking at inspiring biographies.  Today we consider Lord Jeffrey Amherst, commander of the British forces in North America during the French & Indian War (1754-1763).   The town of Amherst, Massachusetts is named after this pioneer in the field of biological warfare.  It was Lord Amherst who came up with the idea of giving smallpox-infested blankets to the Indians.  This theme is explored in a bit of detail on this page at UCLA and more profoundly in tonight’s highly recommended episode of South Park (rebroadcast from Wednesday):  “Red Man’s Greed”.

2 thoughts on “Biographical Focus: Jeffrey Amherst, the first biowarrior”

  1. Jeffrey Amherst was by no means the first biowarrior. At least as
    early as the 14th century, dead horses were being flung over walls as
    a way of spreading disease into besieged towns:

    http://asylum.apocalypse.org/pub/u/zonker/fpp/html/trebuchet.html

    But a few drawings show dead horses being loaded onto trebuchets,
    putrid animals being an early form of biological warfare. Since
    horses weigh now what they did in the 1300s, the engineering
    calculations followed easily.

  2. Another interesting datapoint:

    This little episode resulted in the only tongue-in-cheek college fight song, from my alma mater, Amherst College (“to the Frenchmen and the Indians he didn’t do a thing…”). So what does it say about the authors of the fight song that they were smuggly chuckling about genocide?

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