Virginia Historical Society's odd gems offer uncommon insights into the past

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In 1876, a Virginia man named William Massie, eager to spare his family from smallpox, sent to his father by mail a tiny, reddish splotch of human tissue, the size of a baby's fingernail. It was a smallpox scab, which the recipients would rub onto an open cut in their skin in an effort to inoculate...

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