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
Sir William Jenner, 1st Baronet Sir William Jenner, 1st Baronet Sir William Jenner, 1st Baronet, GCB, QHP, FRCP, FRS (30 January 1815 – 11 December 1898) was a significant English physician primarily known for having discovered the distinction between typhus and typhoid. Jenner was born at Chatham on 30 January 1815, and educated at University College London. He became a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England (M.R.C.S.) in 1837, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (F.R.C.P.) in 1852, and in 1844 took the London M.D. In 1847 he began at the London Fever Hospital investigations into cases of continued fever