Boston learned smallpox inoculation from an enslaved African man. Onesimus told his owner, the minister Cotton Mather, that this was how people at home protected themselves, and in the 1721 epidemic the inoculated died far less often.

1721

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The event

• Jenner's first vaccination1796 · Berkeley, England. In May 1796 country doctor Edward Jenner inoculated young James Phipps with cowpox and showed it protected against smallpox. Vaccination was born — a method that saved hundreds of millions of lives and later made smallpox eradication possible.

18th century

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