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
London Smallpox Hospital make way for St Pancras railway station. The Hospital was replaced by the Highgate Smallpox and Vaccination Hospital, erected in 1848-1850. London Smallpox Hospital The London Smallpox Hospital, sometimes known as the Middlesex County Hospital for Smallpox and Inoculation, was established in 1745–6 and was said to be the first establishment of its type in Europe. The earliest buildings were in the West End of London, Finsbury and Bethnal Green, but in 1752 it moved to the house formerly occupied by Sir John Oldcastle in Coldbath Fields, admitting patients from 1753. A new hospital in St Pancras was opened in