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 1970s. Calf lymph was known as early as 1805 in Italy, but it was the Lyon Medical Conference of 1864 which made the technique known to the wider world. In 1898 calf lymph became the standard method of vaccination for smallpox in the United Kingdom, when arm to arm vaccination was eventually banned (due to complications such as the simultaneous transmission of syphilis). Although Jenner used cowpox, the vaccine now contains a virus immunologically related to cowpox and smallpox viruses called vaccinia which causes a mild infection. The vaccine is infectious, which improves its effectiveness, but causes serious complications for