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
1947 New York City smallpox outbreak died May 7, a week after receiving her vaccination. According to the Center for Disease Control, the rate for post-vaccination encephalitis following the smallpox vaccine is 3 to 12 per million, and the fatality rate is about 1 in a million. (Since this was the largest vaccination campaign ever, it is likely to have contributed substantially to the C.D.C.'s data and estimates.) Even President Harry S. Truman received a vaccination for a brief trip to give a speech in New York City to news reporters. There were two additional cases of smallpox transmitted in the New York City area at