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
Cowpox it was recorded that Phipps did not receive a reaction from it. Although Jenner was not the first person to conceive the notion of cowpox protecting against the smallpox virus, his experiment proved the theory. This vaccination worked temporarily. It was later discovered that the cowpox vaccination only worked temporarily against the invasion of smallpox and the procedure would need to be repeated several times through ones' lifetime to remain smallpox free. In later years, Jenner popularized the experiment, calling it a vaccination from the Latin for cow, vacca. The amount of vaccinations among people of that era increased drastically.