The global history of immunization shows some amazing creativity in terms of documentation. Keeping aside the science and art of discovery to delivery of vaccines, there were numerous people, outside scientific fields, enriched the history with their creativity. Apart from the scientific papers, the history of immunization had been documented by paintings, literature, folk arts, photographs, poetry, and many other forms. For example, Athenian historian and General Thucydides, who scientifically documented the Peloponnesian War (430 BC) and thus the scientific world came to know about the Plague of Athens (430 BC), including the symptoms of the victims during the epidemic. Or for example, the metaphorical connection between the famous rhyme “Ring a Ring o’ Rosie” with the Great Plague of England (1665) as described by noted English folklorists Lona and Peter Opie.

This is probably the most famous image of opisthotonos, due to the extrapyramidal lesion caused by tetanus, created 75 years before the discovery of its causative bacteria Clostridium tetani. The painting was the creation of Sir Charles Bell (1774-1842), a Scottish surgeon, anatomist, physiologist, neurologist, artist & philosophical theologian, who gifted medical world the terminologies like Bell’s Palsy, Bell’s phenomenon, and Bell’s law etc. The horror and anguish of Clostridium tetani was depicted by Sir Charles Bell in his paintings, in which he illustrated a soldier locked tight due to agonising tetany.