The Truth About The First Vaccine Ever Created

A world without vaccines would be a very dark place indeed. Vaccine access is, indisputably, one of the biggest perks to living in the 21st century - especially considering vaccination saves the lives of two to three million people every year, and prevents the spread of some of the deadliest viruses in the world.

That said, it is important to recognize the degree to which vaccines are also a privilege. After all, not every nation has the same easy access to vaccines that is enjoyed in wealthy countries. Even today, 1.5 million people across the world still die every year from vaccine-preventable diseases. Nonetheless, it's a profound medical success that once-terrifying diseases such as measles, diphtheria, and rubella have nearly been eradicated in the U.S. One disease that has been fully wiped out, outside of laboratory samples, was the first disease that humans were ever inoculated against - smallpox.

You don't hear much about smallpox today, and that's largely because nobody has died of it since 1978. But it's easy to forget that smallpox was easily one of the deadliest scourges ever to face the human race, ripping through the world's population on a scale far greater than the plague - and killing countless people for thousands upon thousands of years.

Evidence of deaths from smallpox go back to 1157 BCE, and it continued wiping away populations up through the 11th and 12th centuries, where it was carried through Europe by soldiers returning from the crusades. A few hundred years later, the disease was brought by Spanish conquistadors to the New World, where it may have been a key factor in the extinction of the Aztecs - who had not developed any immunity to the disease.

The point is, smallpox has been around for much of human existence, and nothing ever really slowed it down, until vaccines came along, that is. The degree to which vaccines turned the tide against this disease cannot be underestimated. And a great deal of the credit for popularizing inoculation should go to an 18th-century woman named Lady Mary Montagu.

Mary Montagu had faced smallpox firsthand. It killed her brother, scarred her face, and left a profound impact on her future. Later, when she visited Turkey, she was astonished to witness an old woman who would go to people whose relatives had become sick - carrying with her small amounts of smallpox. Once there, the woman would inject this liquid into the other family members with needles. This is known as variolation, an early form of inoculation.

Variolation of various sorts had been practiced long before the 18th century, but it had never gone widespread, and the old woman inspired Mary Montagu to have her own children inoculated. Then, with great effort, she managed to to convince others in Great Britain to do the same. This was no easy task, of course. Mary's arguments were met with widespread mockery by the medical community, who couldn't believe the gall of a woman challenging male thinking. And that's to say nothing of the money they made ripping people off with ineffective smallpox treatments. However, Lady Mary didn't back down, and when another smallpox epidemic emerged in London, she made a point to publicize the inoculation of her daughter.

Unfortunately, despite changing a number of minds, inoculation still didn't quite become mainstream. Worse still, due to Lady Mary's gender, her incredibly important role in medical history has often been ignored.

The next big step forward occurred in 1796. An English country doctor named Edward Jenner proved that by taking fluid from a smallpox blister and injecting it into human skin, that person would not only not develop smallpox, but be vaccinated from future outbreaks. Jenner demonstrated his case on a young boy named James Phipps, and his proof of concept inspired countless other physicians across the continent to do the same procedure. Based on Jenner's example, a wave of new vaccines for various diseases were developed over the next few centuries, thus freeing much of human society from once-deadly plagues such as whooping cough, polio, measles, mumps, and, of course, smallpox.

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