Smallpox 1718. In 1721, Cotton Mather and colleagues provoked controversy in Boston by inoculating hundreds. In 1796, Edward Jenner, a doctor in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, rural England, discovered that immunity to smallpox could be produced by inoculating a person with material from a cowpox lesion. Cowpox is a poxvirus in the same family as variola. Jenner called the material used for inoculation vaccine, from the root word "vacca", which is Latin for cow. The procedure was much safer than variolation, and did not involve a risk of smallpox transmission. Vaccination to prevent smallpox was soon practiced all over the world. During the
Edward Jenner of nestling birds in general." Jenner's nephew assisted in the study. He was born on 30 June 1737. Jenner's understanding of the cuckoo's behaviour was not entirely believed until the artist Jemima Blackburn, a keen observer of bird life, saw a blind nestling pushing out a host's egg. Her description and illustration of this were enough to convince Charles Darwin to revise a later edition of "On the Origin of Species". Jenner married Catherine Kingscote (died 1815 from tuberculosis) in March 1788. He might have met her while he and other fellows were experimenting with balloons. Jenner's trial balloon descended