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
1837 Great Plains smallpox epidemic Early vaccination efforts by the Hudson's Bay Company were sporadic and unorganized during its monopoly period. Although the HBC recognized the potential of vaccination, understanding that more people ment more fur for them, there was no systematic vaccination program in place until the epidemic was well underway. Some vaccines were sent to trading posts early in the 19th Century but were left to collect dust. The smallpox infection spiked in 1780s, as persisted up to the 1837 epidemic. In what is now Canada, fur trade strengthened communities such as the Mushego Cree, Anishinabe, and Ottawa. The Mandan tribe had previously