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
1978 smallpox outbreak in the United Kingdom police photographer she joined the University of Birmingham Medical School, where she was employed as a medical photographer in the Anatomy Department. Parker often worked in a darkroom above a laboratory where research on smallpox viruses was being conducted. Smallpox is an infectious disease unique to humans, caused by either of two virus variants named "Variola major" and "Variola minor". The last naturally occurring infection was of "Variola minor" in Somalia in 1977. At the time of Parker's death, a laboratory at University of Birmingham Medical School was conducting research on variants of smallpox virus known as "whitepox viruses", which