We often refer to Edward Jenner as the ‘father of vaccination.’ He was not, however, the inventor of the process.  Jenner reported his famous story about inoculating young James Phipps with cowpox and then demonstrating immunity to smallpox.  Taken the pus from a smallpox blister and introducing into a scratch in the skin of an uninfected person to confer protection was invented long before in the harems of the Ottoman Empire.

Before Jenner’s experimentation with Cowpox (a far less virulent form of smallpox) the process of variolation was popularized in Europe by the writer and poet Lady Mary Wortley Montagu whose husband was stationed in Constantinople (now Istanbul). Montagu was best known for her ‘letters from the Ottoman Empire’. As wife of the British ambassador to Turkey, she witnessed variolation in during an epidemic in 1717.  The following year, she chose to have her son inoculated and when she returned to England in 1721, she publicly had her daughter receive the vaccine to promote the practice.  The procedure was initially met with much resistance.  The medical establishment was convinced that this practice was an elaborate hoax and to prove it, several condemned prisoners were similarly inoculated.  They survived!  This publication in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society that prompted people like George Washington to have all the soldiers in the Continental Army (upon advice from Benjamin Rush) inoculated against smallpox.

Ironically, Dr Emmanuel Timmonius, a resident in Constantinople, had described the procedure of inoculation in a 1717 letter published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (London). He claimed that “the Circassians, Georgians, and other Asiatics” had introduced this practice “among the Turks and others at Constantinople”. His letter even triggered a reply from Cotton Maher, a minister in Boston, who reported that his servant Onesimus had undergone the procedure as a child. Two Welsh doctors, Perrot Williams and Richard Wright, reported in similar reply letters that inoculation was well known in Wales and had been practiced there since at least 1600.

It appears that inoculation was practiced independently in several parts of Europe, Africa and Asia. There were many means of administration varying from the use of a needle to having smallpox-contaminated wool was wrapped around a child’s wrist.  Despite the different techniques used, the procedure was referred to by a common name — ‘buying the pocks’ — which implies that inoculation may have had a single origin and most sources suggest this origin was India or China. In China, written accounts of the practice of ‘insufflation’ (blowing smallpox material into the nose) date to the mid-1500s. However, there are claims that inoculation was invented around 1000 ad by a Taoist or Buddhist monk or nun and practiced as a mixture of medicine, magic and spells, considered taboo and therefore never written down.  In India the practice of inoculation can be traced, in Sanscrit texts, back to Bengal, where it had apparently been used for many hundreds of years.

Regardless of geographical origin, the story of inoculation eventually led to one of the greatest medical achievement history — the eradication of smallpox in 1980.   It also inspired the development of vaccines for many more infectious diseases, turning this planet into a much safer place. 

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