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
1972 Yugoslav smallpox outbreak international praise for the successful containment of the epidemic, which was also one of the finest hours for Donald Henderson and the WHO, as well as one of the crucial steps in the eradication of smallpox. In 1982, Serbian director Goran Marković made the film "Variola Vera" about a hospital under quarantine during the epidemic. In 2002, the BBC screened a television drama called "Smallpox 2002", which was partly inspired by the events. 1972 Yugoslav smallpox outbreak The 1972 Yugoslav smallpox outbreak was the last major outbreak of smallpox in Europe. It was centred in Kosovo and Belgrade (both then