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Variolation was the method of inoculation first used to immunize individuals against smallpox (Variola) with material taken from a patient or a recently variolated individual, in the hope that a mild, but protective, infection would result.
Mather wanted to prove variolation was a relatively safe and effective procedure to protect people against smallpox. Many physicians, however, feared the possibility of smallpox fatally spreading and the social implications of deliberately infecting others.
Variolation was known as inoculation in Massachusetts during this time period. This is a procedure that can be performed a few different ways. They all included taking scabs or pus from someone who had natural smallpox.
The smallpox vaccine is used to prevent smallpox infection caused by the variola virus. [10] It is the first vaccine to have been developed against a contagious disease. In 1796, British physician Edward Jenner demonstrated that an infection with the relatively mild cowpox virus conferred immunity against the deadly smallpox virus.
Variolation was the sole method of protection against smallpox other than quarantine until Edward Jenner's discovery of the inoculating abilities of cowpox against the smallpox virus in 1796. Efforts to protect populations against smallpox by way of vaccination followed for centuries after Jenner's discovery.
Onesimus (late 1600s–1700s [1]) was an African (likely Akan) man who was instrumental in the mitigation of smallpox in Boston, Massachusetts.. He introduced his enslaver, Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather, to the principle and procedure of the variolation method of inoculation, which prevented smallpox and laid the foundation for the development of vaccines.
Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by variola virus (often called smallpox virus), which belongs to the genus Orthopoxvirus. [7] [11] The last naturally occurring case was diagnosed in October 1977, and the World Health Organization (WHO) certified the global eradication of the disease in 1980, [10] making smallpox the only human disease to have been eradicated to date.
Though it was practiced in many parts of the world, the technology of inoculation, or variolation, was not in use in Europe apart from Wales, where it was reportedly in use as early as 1600. [8] The practice was widely publicized over a century later by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , who inoculated her own children against smallpox, despite ...