Smallpox treatments

"Small pox" per Primitive Physic:
"628.  Drink largely of toast and water:
629.  Or, let your whole food be milk and water, mixed with a little white bread:
630.  Or, milk and apples.
631.  Take care to have free, pure and cool air.  Therefore open the casement every day: only do not let it chill the patient.
632.  If they strike in, and convulsions follow, drink a pint of cold water immediately.  This instantly stops the convulsions and drives out the pock: tried.
"There may be pustules a second time, coming out and ripening like the small pox, but it is barely [simply] a cutaneous [skin] disorder.
"In violent cases, bleed in the foot: bathe the legs in warm water, twice or thrice a day, before and at the eruption; and apply boiled turnips to the feet.  Never keep the head too hot.
"In very low depressed cases, wine may be given; and if the pustules lie buried in the skin, a gentle vomit.  In many cases a gentle purge of manna ["a gum, a honey-like juice ... it is the product of two different trees, both varieties of the ash*], cream of tartar, or rhubarb.
"In the Crude Ichorose [with thin, watery secretions*] small-pox, a dish of coffee now and then, with a little thick milk in it, has often quieted the vexatious cough.
"After the incrustation [scab] is formed, change the sick: but let it be with very dry warm linen."  Dr. Huxham [John is citing the source he got the suggestion from].  (Wesley, Physic, 97-98.)

Prayer and benediction
Charles Le Brun (1619-1690)
(Wellcome Library)

Early Methodists not only depended on medical treatments, but on prayer, believing that the presence of Christ became tangible through both medicine and spirituality (Webster, Robert. "Balsamic Virtue: Healing Imagery in Charles Wesley" in Newport, Kenneth and Campbell, Ted (eds), Charles Wesley: Life, Literature and Legacy (Peterborough, UK: Epworth, 2007, 237).  Charles Wesley recorded in his journal, "My companion was taken ill of a fever.  We prayed for him in strong faith, nothing doubting.  Monday and Tuesday he grew worse and worse.  On Wednesday the small-pox appeared; a favorable sort.  Yet on Thursday evening we were much alarmed by the great pain and danger he was in.  We had recourse to our never-failing remedy, and received a most remarkable, immediate answer to our prayer.  The great means of his recovery was the prayer of faith." (Wesley, Charles. Journal, p. 238-39, quoted in Shaw, Jane.  The Miraculous Body and Other Rational Wonders:  Religion in Enlightenment England (PhD dissertation, University of California at Berkley, 1994), 74.)

Benjamin Jesty, 1805
(Wellcome Library)

As a praise for the lay practitioner of the 18th century versus the physician, let me point out to you that although Edward Jenner is considered the "inventor" of vaccinations, a woman -- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu -- brought back the idea from women in Turkey, and a farmer inoculated his family with cowpox the year before Jenner even became interested in the subject.  Benjamin Jesty was a farmer in Dorset, who, during a smallpox epidemic, successfully inoculated his wife and two sons directly from a infected cow udder in 1774 (Cule, John.  "The Rev. John Wesley, MA (Oxon.), 1703-1791: 'The Naked Empiricist' and Orthodox Medicine," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Science (1990), 45(1), 45-46, http://ljhamas.oxfordjournals.org, accessed 27 November 2012).

Due to vaccinations, smallpox was declared eradicated worldwide in 1980 (World Health Organization, "Smallpox," http://www.who.int/topics/smallpox/en/, accessed 13 December 2012).
*(Johnson.)