Legendary origin of smallpox variolation (inoculation) in East Asia

Date

c. 1000 CE

Category

Science, technology & invention

Region

East Asia

Era

Post-Classical / Medieval

Significance

Around the turn of the first millennium, Chinese tradition places the legendary origin of variolation, the earliest known technique for deliberately inducing immunity to smallpox by exposing healthy people to material from a mild case of the disease.

According to this tradition, the Song chancellor Wang Dan (957-1017), having lost a son to smallpox, summoned physicians and wise men to Kaifeng to seek a preventive method; the historian Joseph Needham recorded a parallel tradition attributing the invention around 1000 CE to a Daoist or Buddhist recluse, though no reliable contemporary source substantiates so early a date. Chinese practitioners ground dried smallpox scabs into a powder that was blown or inserted with a cotton plug into the nostril (the right nostril for boys, the left for girls), deliberately selecting material from mild cases to provoke a milder, survivable infection. The practice is only firmly documented from the Ming dynasty, with the first clear reference in Wan Quan's medical text of 1549 (Needham dates the earliest reliably attested practice to c. 1567-1572), and a similar skin-puncture method was practiced in India and elsewhere in Asia. Carried west to the Ottoman Empire, variolation was observed in Istanbul by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and introduced to England in the 1720s, where it reduced smallpox mortality and laid the groundwork for Edward Jenner's cowpox vaccine in 1796. Variolation thus represents one of the earliest forms of immunisation in the history of medicine.

Empires active in c. 1000 CE

• Song Dynasty
  960 CE – 1279 CE
• Liao Dynasty (Khitan Empire)
  916 CE – 1125 CE
• Abbasid Caliphate
  750 CE – 1258 CE
• Byzantine Empire
  330 CE – 1453 CE
• Kanem-Bornu Empire
  700 CE – 1900 CE
• Ghana Empire
  700 CE – 1240 CE

Related science, technology & invention events

• Ibn al-Haytham Completes the Book of Optics
  c. 1021 CE
• Jikji printed in Korea, oldest extant book made with movable metal type
  July 1377
• Al-Zahrawi completes the Kitab al-Tasrif, foundational surgical encyclopedia
  c. 1000 CE
• Al-Biruni Measures the Earth's Radius
  c. 1017 CE
• Ibn Sina completes the Canon of Medicine
  c. 1025 CE
• Bi Sheng invents movable-type printing in Song China
  c. 1040–1048 CE

Further reading

A Little History of Science

The wider story

A Little History of Science

William Bynum

Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.

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