What is the history of vaccinations

With the recent news of the Covid-19 vaccination, this marked the fastest time between the development and formal acceptance of a vaccine by authorized medical authorities in recent history. However, vaccinations have now been with us for more than 200 years and ever since the discovery that there were ways to vaccinate against some infectious diseases there have also been some who resisted the idea of being vaccinated.

The Earliest Vaccines

There is evidence of early attempts at vaccinations in the Near East and China in the early Medieval period. In fact, people who survived disease such as smallpox were often asked to treat those afflicted, as people noticed that once you caught an infectious disease often it did not return. Early vaccination attempts mainly involved giving the infected individual small amounts of the disease. The method of variolation was widely practiced in the Ottoman court and, in fact, Western travelers in the 18th century noticed this practice of transferring small amounts of an infected area to another individual in the hopes it creates immunity. Lady Montagu, the wife of the English ambassador in the Ottoman Empire, and who learned and noticed this practice in the Ottoman court, helped bring the practice to England. This method, in the 18th century, was learned by others and eventually it spread variolation practice within the American colonies, where one of the earliest examples of its practice in the Americas comes from 1721 in Boston. Most of these attempts to inoculate using variolation were for smallpox. Tracing the history of variolation, the earliest evidence for this pracitce comes from the fifteenth century in China, where small amounts of the smallpox infection would be placed into the nose of an uninfected individual. Similar practices have been known in India and Sudan. Additionally, in Asia there are reports of monks and individuals who would swallow snake venom to create a form of inoculation.

In the West, the history of formal vaccination attempts is often traced to Edward Jenner in 1798, an English physician, who took Variolae vaccinae (cowpox) and used that to inoculate a 13-year old boy from smallpox by injecting him. This is often seen as a watershed moment in the West, as it begins the long history of vaccinations and, in fact, this single event is often credited with saving more humans than any other action, given the countless other vaccinations and subsequent generations this initial round of vaccinations saved. The term vaccinations, in fact, derives from the virus that causes smallpox, given the importance of that disease in the history of vaccinations. Among all diseases, smallpox represents the longest history of attempted vaccinations, with the disease mostly eradicated by 1979, nearly 200 years after the first vaccination by Edward and hundreds of years after variolation had begun.