Credit: Courtesy U.S. National Library of Medicine
Widely heralded as the doctor who introduced vaccines, English physician Edward Jenner gave his first inoculation on May, 1796, to a young boy, with material from the cowpox blisters of a milkmaid who had caught cowpox from a cow. Controversial at first among both doctors and the general public, vaccines would help control and eradicate some of the world’s deadliest diseases. Once one of the great epidemic killers, smallpox was declared an eradicated disease by the World Health Organization in 1980.
