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
History of smallpox in Mexico Zacatecas. This outbreak is notable because that was the first time that sanitary and preventive campaigns were implemented in New Spain, such as quarantines, inoculation, isolation and the closing of roads. Different institutions provided health and public services to fight against the smallpox epidemic: the most important were The “Ayuntamiento” or city council. The Catholic Church and "Real Tribunal del Protomedicato", which was an institution founded in 1630, managed all sanitary aspects of New Spain including the establishment of quarantines. Charity boards were created, where rich people of the city donated money to build hospitals and to help and cure