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
Royal Edward (1796 ship) then renamed her. Though volumes of "Lloyd's Register" and the "Register of Shipping" give a capture year of 1796, she does not enter "Lloyd's Register" before 1798. She sailed as a West Indiaman before entering into the slave trade. First slave voyage (1799-1800): Captain Thomas Bushell sailed from England on 4 September 1799. She gathered her slaves at Bonny Island, and arrived at Kingston, Jamaica on 14 July 1800. She had embarked 432 slaves and she disembarked 316, for a loss rate of 8.3%. "Royal Edward" left Jamaica on 18 October and arrived back at Liverpool on 23 December. She