Smallpox vaccine Smallpox vaccine Smallpox vaccine, the first successful vaccine to be developed, was introduced by Edward Jenner in 1796. He followed up his observation that milkmaids who had previously caught cowpox did not later catch smallpox by showing that inoculated cowpox protected against inoculated smallpox. Dryvax is a freeze-dried calf lymph smallpox vaccine. It is the world's oldest smallpox vaccine, created in the late 19th century by American Home Products, a predecessor of Wyeth. By the 1940s, Wyeth was the leading US manufacturer of the vaccine and the only manufacturer by the 1960s. After world health authorities declared smallpox had been
Mozart and smallpox reached European countries. Inoculation was not the same as the vaccination which later succeeded in eradicating the disease; rather, an inoculated person was treated with live smallpox virus, taken from pustules of the mildest variety of smallpox that could be found. Inoculation offered immunity to smallpox, but the procedure carried a definite risk that the inoculated person could die from smallpox as a result. Thus, many parents felt that they would rather do nothing, risking future smallpox arriving at random, rather than carry out a deliberate act that might well kill their children immediately. As Mozart biographer Ruth Halliwell points