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
1974 smallpox epidemic in India the last cases of smallpox, called "Target Zero", with the identification of the last smallpox patient in India occurring on May 24, 1975. By 1980, smallpox was certified as being eradicated from the world. Smallpox was eradicated due to the WHO's smallpox eradication program. This program was formally established in 1958, but because of logistics disagreements between the WHO and the Indian government, did not progress rapidly. Headway only began to take place in India after the reorganization of the WHO in the mid 1960s. Donald Henderson, who was a U.S. Public Health Services Officer stationed in New Delhi, said