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
Mozart and smallpox wrote, 'the most terrible of all the ministers of death.' Those who survived smallpox did not always survive intact; it frequently inflicted blindness on its survivors. The survival rate was particularly low for children. The physical appearance of the disease was frightening to patients and to their caretakers: the patient's skin became covered with large, bulging pustules, which often left conspicuous pitting on the skin of patients who survived the disease. Medicine had made only slight progress against the disease in Mozart's time. Around the second decade of the 18th century the method of inoculation, which had originated in Asia,