Milkmaids in eighteenth-century England had faces unblemished by smallpox. Nobody knew why, but anyone could see it was true. Nearly everyone in England at that time got smallpox and many of those who survived bore the scars of the disease on their faces. Folk knowledge held that if a milkmaid milked a cow blistered with cowpox and developed some blisters on her hands, she would not contract smallpox even while nursing victims of an epidemic.
