TEACHING KIT
The smallpox vaccine
Though smallpox has now been eradicated, it was a global scourge for many centuries,
responsible for millions of deaths. It is the first disease for which a vaccine was developed in the
eighteenth century.
Probably introduced into Europe by the Arab invasions of the first century, smallpox was already endemic
in Asia at that time. It was the Chinese, in the eleventh century who tested the first immunization technique
by placing a person to be immunized in contact with suppurating matter taken from the pustules of a smallpox victim. Though the results were variable (1 to 2 % of inoculees died of the disease) this “variolation”
technique gradually spread along the Silk Road. It reached Europe in the early eighteenth century and
was taken up by European doctors.
Edward Jenner’s discovery
In the late eighteenth century, Edward Jenner, an English physician, observed that
dairymaids infected by cowpox, a disease caught from cows with symptoms very
similar to those of smallpox, then became immune to smallpox. He concluded that
cowpox provided protection against the disease.
In 1796, he drew pus from the hand of a woman with cowpox and used it to inoculate
an eight-year-old boy. The boy fell ill, but recovered very quickly. Three months
later, the child was inoculated with smallpox and showed no signs of infection. Jenner repeated the experiment several times and published his findings
in 1798. It was he who coined the term “vaccination”, based on the Latin word
vaccinus meaning “from cows”. It now designates the process of inoculating
weakened or dead pathogens to confer immunity to a disease.
Edward Jenner
A disease that has now been eradicated
Vaccination spread rapidly across Europe and North America, leading
to a rapid decline in smallpox mortality, especially among children for
whom it was frequently fatal. But the disease remained endemic in the
west throughout the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth
century in certain developing countries.
Systematic population vaccination campaigns organized by the
WHO from 1967 dealt a final blow to the disease. The last case
was reported in 1977 in Somalia, and the disease was declared
eradicated by the WHO in 1980.
To find out more (www.ined.fr)
Smallpox Vaccination and Mortality Decline (Mercer A. J., Population Studies, 1985, vol. 39, 2, p 287-307)
Understanding length of life (Animation)
Infant mortality in France (Teaching Kit)
Last update: November 2007
Institut national d’études démographiques - 133, bld Davout 75 980 Paris cedex 20 - www.ined.fr