History of smallpox In the late 1770s, during the American Revolutionary War, smallpox returned once more and killed thousands. Peter Kalm in his "Travels in North America", described how in that period, the dying Indian villages became overrun with wolves feasting on the corpses and weakened survivors. Smallpox was also used as a weapon by the British. In 1799, the physician Valentine Seaman administered the first smallpox vaccine in the United States. He gave his children a smallpox vaccination using a serum acquired from Edward Jenner, the British physician who invented the vaccine from fluid taken from cowpox lesions. Though vaccines were misunderstood
1947 New York City smallpox outbreak stated that they had other diseases of the central nervous system and none had encephalitis. Three deaths were clearly related to other complications of the vaccine—a 66-year-old man who developed sepsis from an infected vaccination site, and two infants with eczema who developed generalized vaccinia after contact with others who had been vaccinated. Two additional victims who received the smallpox vaccine and died were named in newspaper reports—Benjamin F. Cohen, age 41, of Newark, N.J., who died on May 5, a little more than two weeks after being vaccinated, and Nancy Jean Vanderhoof, age 3, of New Providence, N.J., who