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 in Mexico in Mexico) in which he included an introduction about what is smallpox and instructions to treat it, such as drinking warm water with salt and honey, gargling with water and vinegar, keep tidy and clean and finish treatment by taking a purgative. He thought that smallpox was a remedy of nature to clear bad mood and doctors should not accelerate the process of healing because it was against nature. He wrote a letter to propose his measures as a strategy to combat smallpox in which he also included recommendations like purify air with gunpowder and scent, ventilate churches where bodies