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
Smallpox vaccine in Koltsovo, Russia. These states report that their repositories are for possible antibioweaponry research and insurance if some obscure reservoir of natural smallpox is discovered in the future. The word "vaccine" is derived from "Variolae vaccinae" (i.e. smallpox of the cow), the term devised by Jenner to denote cowpox and used in the long title of his "An enquiry into the causes and effects of Variolae vaccinae, known by the name of cow pox". Vaccination, the term which soon replaced "cowpox inoculation" and "vaccine inoculation", was first used in print by Jenner's friend, Richard Dunning in 1800. Initially, the terms