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 the epidemic these groups were never able to recover. Ethnic backgrounds also merged as survivors from different communities joined together. As some communities such as the Saulteaux were able to take advantage of vaccination efforts by the HBC they also took advantage of struggling Indigenous groups. The HBC vaccination efforts were focused on populations that produced furs. As result, the Plains Cree and Saulteaux pushed out its borders as others retreated during the epidemic. There have been many documented cases of smallpox being intentionally spread among the indigenous people of the Americas by colonizers. As observed by academic researchers in