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 Institute for Vaccine Research Edward Jenner Institute for Vaccine Research The Edward Jenner Institute for Vaccine Research was an independent research institute named after Edward Jenner, the inventor of vaccination. It was co-located with the Compton Laboratory of the Institute for Animal Health on a campus in the English village of Compton. After occupying temporary laboratory space at the Institute for Animal Health from 1996, the Institute moved to a newly completed laboratory building in 1998. Funding of the Institute continued until October 2005 when it was closed. A successor institute, formed by a partnership between the University of Oxford and the UK Institute