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
Paris under Napoleon Beauharnais, the mother of Napoleon III, who both survived; it killed the poet Jean François de Saint-Lambert, and writers Laharpe and Maréchal. Napoleon created a Health Council under the Prefect of Police to monitor the safety of the water supply, food products, and the environmental effects of new factories and workshops. The committee also made the first systematic surveys of health conditions in Paris neighborhoods, and provided the first widespread vaccinations against smallpox. Napoleon also made efforts to improve the health of the city, by building a canal to provide fresh water and by constructing sewers under the streets that