The Strange History of the Anti-Vaccine Movement

And so, when UK doctor Edward Jenner developed the first version of the smallpox vaccine in 1796, he was hopeful that he might change history. He had observed that milkmaids were curiously immune to smallpox, likely because of their prior infection by cowpox – a related, but much less dangerous, virus. To test the idea that he could confer smallpox immunity this way, he took material from a milkmaid's cowpox sore and injected it into the arm of an eight-year-old child – an experiment that would be unacceptable by the standards of modern medical ethics. The boy proved immune to smallpox infection. Jenner named the procedure after the Latin for cow, vacca – and the first vaccine was born.