Inoculation
A notice explaining about smallpox innoculation
in North America (1726)
In the 1500s, when people from Europe first began to go to South America, they brought a man from Africa (as a slave) who had smallpox with them, and some of the people who lived in South America caught it. None of these people were immune, and within a few years about 60-90 percent of the people died (that's six to nine out of every ten people!). Soon people in North America caught smallpox too, and most of them also died. Most of the people in North and South America died of either smallpox or measles - that's why the Europeans were able to conquer them.
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(a project)
Finally in the 1700s people in England and in North America began to hear about the Asian vaccination process, and they started to use it. In Boston, an African man named Onesimus who worked for Cotton Mather as a slave told people that he had been vaccinated in Africa, before he left, and explained how to do it. Gradually doctors developed methods of vaccinating using shots instead of blowing scabs up your nose. More and more people were vaccinated, all over the world, until the last case of smallpox in the world was in 1977, in Somalia (East Africa).
To learn more about smallpox, check out these books from Amazon or from your local library:
Bubonic
plague (with pictures)
Measles
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