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
Smallpox the first use of the term "variola"; other historians speculate that Arab armies first carried smallpox from Africa into Southwestern Europe during the 7th and 8th centuries. In the 9th century the Persian physician, Rhazes, provided one of the most definitive descriptions of smallpox and was the first to differentiate smallpox from measles and chickenpox in his "Kitab fi al-jadari wa-al-hasbah" ("The Book of Smallpox and Measles"). During the Middle Ages, smallpox made periodic incursions into Europe but did not become established there until the population increased and population movement became more active during the era of the Crusades. By