At a time of increasing fears over bio-terrorism, the behaviour of a virus unleashed on a civilian population has attracted considerable interest among medical scientists. How susceptible is a community to a particular epidemic, and how might its spread be predicted and controlled?

This is, to a great extent, a statistical problem. How many people will go down with the infection at its initial stage, and how effectively can medical intervention prevent an infection becoming an epidemic?

In such research, evidence from the past can be just as useful as what comes from the laboratory and the test-tube. One recent study by two scientists from Porton Down – Steve Leach and Raymond Gani – has examined the transmission rates of smallpox, taking a few well-testified historical examples as their evidence.

And thus, the epidemic that felled the Cotswold town of Burford in 1758 is still a matter of active debate. Smallpox was easily the most deadly disease of the 18th century, killing some half a million Europeans each year, and its footprint can be traced everywhere. There was nothing small about smallpox.

Yet even in a century, and a country, where the disease was endemic, Burford’s sufferings were notable and striking. In that town of little more than 1,000 souls, around 190 people succumbed. Leach and Gani calculate a strike rate in Burford of 14 per cent. Given that the Burford sexton was accustomed to burying around 40 people a year, the number of deaths was unprecedented.

Eighteenth century Burford was a bustling place, with a successful paper mill, a thriving market and a growing reputation for its horse-racing. If the town feels like a tranquil backwater today, the events of 1758 probably have much to with it.

Joan Moody’s excellent booklet on the outbreak, on sale in the Burford museum, recounts the grim tale in grim detail.

The first death (of one Thomas Wheeler) took place in early April, and the epidemic peaked in June with the burial of 91 victims, followed by 34 more in July. By the middle of August the outbreak had run its course.

How the disease reached Burford in the first place is unknown, but a town with widespread trade connections did not have to look far. Local rumour was that it had come in a containment of rags bound for the paper-mill. If so, it mirrored the way plague reached the village of Eyam in the previous century.

What is significant to scientists is that Burford was clearly a town with a low level of immunity. In the larger towns and cities, where smallpox came and went on a regular basis, such resistance was stronger.

The outbreak took particular toll on some families. Over the course of April and early May, John Humfrys lost his wife and four children, while the death of Benjamin Arnold in July was preceded by that of his three children. The family links were a significant factor to the parish overseers, who found themselves having to pay for nursing care and interments, when the bread-winner was either dead or incapacitated.

Luckily for the parish coffers, in high-profile cases such as this, charitable collections, promoted by the local newspaper and the parish grapevine, came to the sufferers’ assistance. Both the Oxford Journal and the overseers’ accounts mention a wide range of donations, including £122 from Oxford University.

And, of course, the survivors of the epidemic continued to suffer long after the disease had abated. A charity ball was held at The Bull in Burford on September 21 to address their cause. All such large collections were turned into small individual payments by the overseers for bedding, cleansing, shoes, medicine and so forth.

It was unfortunate for Burford that smallpox came to call a little too early for medical protection, even though the breakthrough in the fight against smallpox took place just down the road in Gloucestershire. Smallpox vaccination, using the method pioneered by Edward Jenner at Berkeley, first took place in the town in 1819.

Prior to that, practitioners had been experimenting with inoculation. That is, patients were deliberately infected with a small amount of the smallpox virus in order to encourage resistance. Some parish authorities, eager to explore any way to defend themselves against the spread of the disease, had been encouraging (and in some cases forcing) the poor to be inoculated by the 1750s.

But here again, it was too late for Burford.

Dr Jenner’s breakthrough demonstrated that smallpox was a disease that could be prevented and, in the long term, eradicated. And it is one of the great triumphs of world medicine that a disease which was still killing two million people a year in the late 1950s had been wiped out by 1979. There would be no more Burfords.

There is, however, an ironic coda to the story. The last recorded death from smallpox anywhere in the world was that of Janet Parker, a medical photographer from Birmingham. Parker was working on the floor above a lab in the University of Birmingham Medical School, which had been conducting experiments on variants of the smallpox virus. Here she had been accidentally (and fatally) exposed to the virus. It was testimony alone to its extraordinary virulence.

She died a few days later – on September 11, 1978 – in East Birmingham Hospital.

The irony? Janet Parker’s home address was Burford Park Road in Kings Norton.