Virology in order to immunize others. In 1717 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu observed the practice in Istanbul and attempted to popularize it in Britain, but encountered considerable resistance. In 1796 Edward Jenner developed a much safer method, using cowpox to successfully immunize a young boy against smallpox, and this practice was widely adopted. Vaccinations against other viral diseases followed, including the successful rabies vaccination by Louis Pasteur in 1886. The nature of viruses however was not clear to these researchers. In 1892, the Russian biologist Dmitry Ivanovsky used a Chamberland filter to try to isolate the bacteria that caused tobacco mosaic
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