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
1775–82 North American smallpox epidemic public. These measures included the refusal to allow contact between his soldiers and the viral refugees of Boston. Additionally, certain retreats of the Continental Army can be linked to Washington's wish to avoid smallpox and his intense caution when it came to his troops. Though it was practiced in many parts of the world, the technology of inoculation, or Variolation, was not known in Europe until the 1700s. It was widely publicized by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who inoculated her own children against smallpox, despite widespread concern and controversy. Inoculation was the practice of introducing infected materials in to the