In a year when one presidential candidate endorses vaccines, another is ambivalent and a third is staunchly opposed, it’s worth remembering that immunization played a key role in America’s War of Independence.
Because smallpox was common in Europe's crowded cities, most Europeans contracted it in childhood. Those who survived were immune to the disease. This observation led to the risky but effective practice of, a procedure that involved deliberately introducing pus from a smallpox patient into the skin of an uninfected individual. The disease that followed was sometimes difficult, but less likely to be fatal than natural infection.
The Colonies’ doctors did their part. After a smallpox outbreak in 1721, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston noted that the death rate from natural infection was 14%, but the death rate from inoculation was only 2%. Four decades later, Dr. Joseph Warren opened an inoculation clinic on Castle Island in Boston Harbor. In 1764, he inoculated John Adams. Dr. Warren continued inoculating Bostonians until his death at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775.
Twenty years later, in 1796, Edward Jenner determined that inoculation with cowpox, a far milder virus, conferred equally powerful immunity against smallpox. He named the procedure “vaccination” after the Latin word for cow .Two centuries after General Washington’s fateful decision, a vaccination strategy devised and implemented by another American, CDC epidemiologist Dr.