escargot said:
Remember Dr Jenner and the milkmaids? He listened to folk knowledge about milkmaids, who were traditionally immune to smallpox because they always caught a similar but mild disease, cowpox, from their close contact with cattle. He tried infecting people with first cowpox then smallpox. None caught smallpox. That's why we call this treatment 'vaccination'- it means 'cow treatment'!
Myth. Didn't happen that way.
What actually occurred was that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689 - 1762), wife of the British Ambassador to Constantinople, encountered the widespread use of smallpox innoculations (actually cowpox used to protect against smallpox) in Turkey, the practice having spread there from China sometime after 1572 (probably after 1643, when Yu Ch'ang published his
Miscellaneous Ideas in Medicine). Lady Mary -herself a smallpox victim: she had been a renowned beauty in her youth until smallpox had left her badly scarred-
demanded that her family were 'variolated' in 1718, at which time there was a smallpox epidemic in London. The treatment was so successful that by 1721, 'engrafting' -as it became called- was becoming widely practiced throughout Europe. The earliest accounts of the practice in the European medical literature are an account in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1714, by one E. Timoni, and another account in the same journal in 1716 by one J. Pilarini.
In China, the technique first appears around the year 980, when Prime Minister Wang Tan summoned doctors, shamans, wise men and women and alchemists from all over China: his eldest son had just died of smallpox and he wanted to protect the rest of his family from a similar fate. An unnamed Daoist monk or nun from Szhechuan (
a three-white adept of the school of the ancient immortals) provided the first recorded use of innoculation against the disease. The practice was apparently never widespread in China despite being alluded to regularly in medical works until around 1567, when the practice finally took off in a big way.
Source: The Genius of China by Robert Temple, Prion Books 1991 (1998 ed.), ISBN 1-85375-292-4. This book is a distillation of Dr. Joseph Needham, FRS, FBA's Science and Civilization in China, Vols. 3, 4, 5 and 6.