Mozart and smallpox the imperial family were successful, and led to greater public acceptance for the procedure. Smallpox struck the Mozart family again in the next generation: Nannerl's eldest son Leopold and two of her stepchildren caught the disease during an outbreak in the Salzburg area in 1787. All three children survived. In 1796, the discovery of vaccination—the use of the related cowpox virus to immunize against smallpox—by Edward Jenner revolutionized the ability of medicine to deal with smallpox. Vaccination reached Vienna around 1800, when yet another local epidemic created impetus for its adoption. One of the doctors trained in the Vienna campaign,
1978 smallpox outbreak in the United Kingdom free of smallpox on 16 October 1978. At the time of the outbreak, the WHO had been about to certify that smallpox had been eradicated globally. It eventually did so in 1980. On 5 September 1978, Parker's 71-year-old father, Frederick Witcomb, of Myrtle Avenue, Kings Heath, died while in quarantine at Catherine-de-Barnes Hospital. He appeared to have died following a cardiac arrest when visiting his daughter. No post-mortem was carried out on his body because of the risk of smallpox infection. On 6 September 1978, Henry Bedson, then Head of the Microbiology Department at the University of Birmingham Medical School