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 early as 1803, the Spanish Crown organized the Balmis expedition to transport the vaccine to the Spanish colonies in the Americas and the Philippines, and establish mass vaccination programs there. The U.S. Congress passed the Vaccine Act of 1813 to ensure that safe smallpox vaccine would be available to the American public. By about 1817, a very solid state vaccination program existed in the Dutch East Indies. In British India a program was launched to propagate smallpox vaccination, through Indian vaccinators, under the supervision of European officials. Nevertheless, British vaccination efforts in India, and in Burma in particular, were hampered