1932, the Smallpox Year: Six Months That Reached Every House in Kuwait

In mid-July 1932 smallpox broke out in Kuwait Town, and it did not let go until the end of the year. In those six months more than 3,000 people died, most of them children. Kuwaitis named it “the smallpox year”.

A Town Without Modern Medicine

Kuwait then had a single hospital, run by the American mission, with one doctor and a few assistants. That is how the heritage historian Abdullah Khaled Al-Hatem describes it in his book From Here Kuwait Began: the town had no way to prevent the epidemic and no way to fight it.

In his history of Kuwait’s health services up to independence, Dr Khalid Fahad Al-Jarallah draws on the mission doctors’ own reports. They wrote that the disease entered every house inside the town wall and then crossed it to the desert communities, that smallpox returned every few years and killed thousands, and that many who survived were left blind or scarred.

Closing the Gates

One hospital could not cope, so the head of the municipality, Sulaiman Khaled Al-Adsani, was told to do whatever he judged necessary. Many recent arrivals were sent away, travellers from infected places were barred from entering, and guards were doubled at the town’s gates, alongside other precautions.

The First Vaccinator

Al-Hatem names Sheikh Musaed Al-Azmi as the first Kuwaiti to treat smallpox by inoculation. He had gone to Egypt to study and learned the technique from a doctor there, bought his supplies in India, and came home by way of Yemen, Ras Al-Khaimah and Al-Ahsa, turning his own house in Kuwait into a vaccination clinic.

Photo: the former American mission hospital in Kuwait City as it stands today, now the Amricani Cultural Centre. By Zairon, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: Kuwait News Agency (KUNA), “Smallpox swept Kuwait in the 1930s” (in Arabic), 15 July 2022, citing Dr Khalid Fahad Al-Jarallah’s history of Kuwait’s health services and Abdullah Khaled Al-Hatem’s From Here Kuwait Began.