Cotton Mather, one of the era’s most influential ministers, had actively promoted inoculation. To be sure, there was ample reason to worry: Early smallpox treatments, while effective in many who were inoculated, sickened or even killed others. Yet just as with COVID-19 vaccines in 2021, some took a skeptical view of smallpox inoculations in the 18th century, digitized documents show. Jenner’s pioneering of vaccination, using instead a less lethal strain of the virus that infected cows, was a huge scientific advance. The procedure, or variations of it, had been practiced since ancient times in Asia. The world’s first proper vaccination didn’t occur until the end of that century, when an English country doctor named Edward Jenner inoculated an 8-year-old boy against smallpox in 1796.īefore then, doctors used inoculation, or variolation as it was often called, introducing a trace amount of the smallpox virus into the skin. Now, digitized church records are helping to round out the picture of how the colonists coped when it was their turn to endure pestilence. Much earlier outbreaks, also imported from Europe, killed Native Americans indiscriminately in the 1600s.
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