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 of Royal Marines may have attempted to use smallpox as a biological weapon in 1789. However, in 2002, historian John Connor stated that Day's theory was "unsustainable". That same year, theories that smallpox was introduced with settlers, deliberately or otherwise, were contested in a full-length book by historian Judy Campbell: "Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia 1780-1880" (2002). Campbell consulted, during the writing of her book, Frank Fenner, who had overseen the final stages of a successful campaign by the World Health Organization (WHO) to eradicate smallpox. Campbell argued that scientific evidence concerning the viability of variolous