Share of total deaths due to smallpox in Sweden 1774-1800

As Sweden was one of the first countries to implement smallpox vaccination on a large scale, and the second country in the world to successfully eradicate the disease, it is important to understand the role that smallpox had played Sweden's demographic development. In the late eighteenth century, smallpox epidemics swept across the Scandinavian country with relative regularity, peaking in four or five year intervals. In 1779 and 1784, smallpox epidemics were responsible for one quarter and one fifth of all Swedish deaths respectively; in other terms, this meant that roughly 0.7 percent and 0.6 percent of the entire population died due to smallpox in these years. While data for this time is scarce in other continents, when compared with other countries or cities in Europe, we can see that the trends observed here were not unique to Sweden; thus highlighting the devastating toll that smallpox pandemics took on Europe's population in the pre-vaccination era.