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
Vaccination the English ambassador at Istanbul between 1716 and 1718, who almost died from smallpox as a young adult and was physically scarred from it. Inoculation was adopted both in England and in America nearly half a century before Jenner's famous smallpox vaccine of 1796 but the death rate of about 2% from this method meant that it was mainly used during dangerous outbreaks of the disease and remained controversial. It was noticed during the 18th century that people who had suffered from the less virulent cowpox were immune to smallpox, and the first recorded use of this idea was by