Variolation against smallpox reaches Europe
- Date
- 1721
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- Europe
- Era
- Early Modern
- Significance
Variolation, the deliberate inoculation of healthy people with material from smallpox pustules to induce a mild, survivable infection and lifelong immunity, was transmitted from Asia, Africa, and the Ottoman world into Western Europe and crystallised in England in 1721.
The technique had long been practiced in China (via nasal insufflation of powdered scabs), India, the Sudan, and across the Ottoman Empire, where Constantinople physicians Emanuel Timoni and Jacob Pylarini sent accounts to the Royal Society of London (published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1714 and 1716) that initially drew little notice. The decisive advocate was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British ambassador to the Porte, who observed Turkish 'engrafting,' had her son inoculated at Constantinople in 1718, and on returning to London had her daughter inoculated in 1721. With backing from Caroline, Princess of Wales, surgeon Charles Maitland carried out the celebrated 'Royal Experiment' that year, inoculating seven condemned Newgate prisoners who survived and won pardons, after which the royal children were inoculated. Variolation proved far safer than natural infection, killing roughly 1-2 percent of those treated versus about 30 percent of those who caught smallpox in the wild, and it spread across Europe to become the principal defence against the disease until Edward Jenner's safer cowpox vaccination superseded it after 1796.
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Empires active in 1721
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Russian Empire1721 CE – 1917 CE
- Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth1569 CE – 1795 CE
- French Colonial Empire (First)1534 CE – 1814 CE
Related science, technology & invention events
- Newton's Principia and universal gravitation1687
- Watt patents the rotative steam engine1781
- Edward Jenner Develops Smallpox Vaccination14 May 1796
- West African Variolation Knowledge Transmitted to the Americas via Onesimus1721 (knowledge conveyed c. 1716; campaign 1721-1722)
- Sawai Jai Singh II builds the Jantar Mantar observatoriesc. 1724
- Arkwright's Cromford Mill and the birth of the factory system1771 (water frame patented 1769)
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Science
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