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
History of smallpox the pus collected from mature smallpox sores. Several punctures with this needle were made either below the deltoid muscle or in the forehead, and then were covered with a paste made from boiled rice. Variolation spread farther from India to other countries in south west Asia, and then to the Balkans. In 1713, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's brother died of smallpox; she too contracted the virus two years later at the age of twenty-six, leaving her badly scarred. When her husband was made ambassador to Ottoman Empire, she accompanied him to Constantinople. It was here that Lady Mary first came