Reflexiones bioéticas en torno a la historia de las epidemias de viruela

Epidemics can be considered as collective illnesses, in the sense that they affect a whole large community, and can even lead to its total destruction. For this reason they present with special bioethical problems, as they entail giving priority to certain collective values, linked with the ‘common good’, over other values that are usually considered in medical ethics. For this reason, a short history of epidemics will help clarify the real importance and complexity of this picture, which could possibly face humankind of the present and the future in forms even more complex than past epidemics. In addition, the consideration of certain episodes of this history, in which the conscious use of contagion was adopted to destroy enemy populations, brings one rather close to the currently wide discussed issue of the ‘double use’ of the results of scientific research.