Today in 1677, the first medical treatise printed in the United States was published in Boston, Massachusetts.
The pamphlet was titled “Brief rule to guide the common people of New England how to order themselves and theirs in the small pocks, or measles.”
The regular practice of variolation [i.e., inoculation against smallpox] reached the New World in 1721. Under the guidance of the Rev. Cotton Mather (1663–1728) and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston (1679–1766), variolation became quite popular in the colonies. Mather, a graduate of Harvard College, was always very interested in science and medicine. When a ship from the West Indies carried persons sick with smallpox into Boston in 1721, an epidemic broke out in Boston and other parts of Massachusetts. Mather wrote a cautious letter recommending immediate variolation. However, he persuaded only Dr. Boylston. With Mather's support, Boylston immediately started a variolation program and continued to inoculate many volunteers, despite many adversaries in both the public and the medical community in Boston. As the disease spread, so did the controversy around Mather and Boylston. At the height of the epidemic, a bomb was thrown into Mather's house.
To make their point, Mather and Boylston used a statistical approach to compare the mortality rate of natural smallpox infection with that contracted by variolation. During the great epidemic of 1721, approximately half of Boston's 12,000 citizens contracted smallpox. The fatality rate for the naturally contracted disease was 14%, whereas Boylston and Mather reported a mortality rate of only 2% among variolated individuals. This may have been the first time that comparative analysis was used to evaluate a medical procedure.
…the rapid adoption of variolation in Europe can be directly traced to the efforts of Cotton Mather during the Boston smallpox epidemic in 1721. Although many British physicians remained skeptical even after Mather's success, the data he had published were eventually influential. Variolation was subsequently adopted in England and spread from there throughout Western Europe.
In 1757, an 8-year-old boy was inoculated with smallpox in Gloucester; he was one of thousands of children inoculated that year in England. The procedure was effective, as the boy developed a mild case of smallpox and was subsequently immune to the disease. His name was Edward Jenner…
Jenner's work represented the first scientific attempt to control an infectious disease by the deliberate use of vaccination. Strictly speaking, he did not discover vaccination but was the first person to confer scientific status on the procedure and to pursue its scientific investigation.
In science credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not the man to whom the idea first occurs. —Francis Galton