The Early Origins of Vaccination
Irrational resistance to inoculation cropped up even before vaccines were invented. Variolation is the first recorded method to immunize people against an infectious disease, smallpox. Named after the illness’ strains, Variola minor and Variola major, material was taken from a recently infected person, and given to the hale to produce a mild infection. The deliberately variolated individual developed some small and localized postules, just like those caused by smallpox. After about a month, they subsided, and whatever mild disease symptoms had cropped up faded away. That left the recipient immune from future – and decidedly more dangerous – bouts of illness.
The risk of death was around 0.5% to 2%. Significant, but still far better than the risk of a regular smallpox infection. First used in China in the fifteenth century, the method spread to India, the Middle East and Africa, and eventually reached Britain and North America in the eighteenth century. Testing was crude and by modern standards controversial: in 1722, six condemned inmates at Newgate Prison were offered their freedom if they agreed to get variolated and then exposed to smallpox. The test was a success, and variolation spread – but not without a moral panic and vehement resistance from some segments of the public.