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
Mozart and smallpox increased crowding, making it easier for the disease to spread; yet effective protection from smallpox through a smallpox vaccine was discovered only at the end of the century (see below). The disease was a terrible one for its victims. Ian and Jenifer Glynn write: So what was it like? As children, we were told it was like chickenpox but worse. In fact it is not related to chickenpox, and it was unimaginably worse. In an unvaccinated population, something like 10–30 percent of all patients with smallpox would be expected to die. And dying was not easy; smallpox was, as Macaulay