Resistance to mandatory smallpox vaccination increased, particularly in the North of England, notwithstanding an epidemic in 1871-72.

An epidemic of smallpox resulted in 42,000 deaths in England and Wales.

His father, John Hatch Synge , was a barrister from an originally English family which had established itself for generations in Ireland and had until recently owned estates in County Wicklow. He died of smallpox in spring 1872 and was buried on his youngest son's first birthday.

MAH 's mother, born Daisy Duncan but later called Margaret by her husband, was lovely, but completely uninterested in her own looks. She had been under eleven when her Irish Home Ruler father died of smallpox at barely forty leaving seven children. A wealthy Mrs Winkworth from Bolton offered a job as companion to her daughter, and since none of her elder sisters would consent to leave home, Daisy took the job. She left her noisy, talented, egalitarian, undisciplined home for one which was regulated, disciplined, enlightened, rich, comfortable, ugly. But this different household also had something to teach her, and her employer, Emma Winkworth , became her patron and friend, and sent her as a student to Newnham College, Cambridge . After this Daisy took a post as a botany teacher at the Manchester High School for Girls . She worked there until she met her future husband, whom she married in 1881.

In this work KEI catalogues some of the projects sponsored by the Health Organization of the League of Nations (which was later, on 22 July 1946, absorbed into the World Health Organization ). Especially she looks at research into, and programmes for, the prevention and treatment of cholera, tuberculosis, malaria, typhus, smallpox, enteric and dengue fevers, leprosy, cancer, and other diseases and epidemics.

Isla Stewart assumed the post of matron at the smallpox camps in Darenth near Dartford, Kent.

Bror had originally bought them seven hundred acres of land only recently appropriated for development by white settlers. He then sold that and bought the four-and-a-half-thousand-acre coffee plantation in the Ngong Hills in what is now Kenya, despite knowing nothing about growing coffee. They started with twelve hundred black field hands and six European managers. Their company was called the Swedo-African Coffee Company until it was incorporated as the Karen Coffee Company , backed by ID 's family. She became its effective manager. Her difficulties in running the operation included basic climatological ones (the land turned out to be a fraction too high for coffee and the soil too acidic), as well as a series of droughts and an outbreak of smallpox.