Episode 301: From Inoculation to Vaccination, Part 1

Smallpox was the most feared disease in North America and in many parts of the world before its eradication in 1980. So how did early Americans live with smallpox and work to prevent it? How did they help eradicate this terrible disease?

Over the next two episodes, we’ll explore smallpox in North America. We’ll investigate how smallpox came to North America, how North Americans worked to contain, control, and prevent outbreaks of the disease, and how the story of smallpox is also the story of immunization.

In this episode, we join experts Dr. René Najera, Farren Yero, Ben Mutschler, and Andrew Wehrman for a journey through the history of smallpox and the world’s first immunization procedure: inoculation.

About the Show

Ben Franklin’s World is a podcast about early American history.

It is a show for people who love history and for those who want to know more about the historical people and events that have impacted and shaped our present-day world.

Ben Franklin’s World is a production of the Omohundro Institute.

Episode Summary

Smallpox was the most feared disease in North America and in many parts of the world before its eradication in 1980. The history of smallpox allows us to see how the disease and the world’s first immunization procedure, inoculation, made their way to North America. It also allows us to see how early Americans at first challenged and then adopted measures of smallpox control and prevention in the name of public health.

In this episode we speak with Ben Mutschler, a history professor at Oregon State University and author of The Province of Affliction: Illness and the Making of New England; René Najera, a Doctor of Public Health, an Epidemiologist and Director of The History of Vaccines: An Educational Resource by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia; Farren Yero, a post-doctoral associate in the department of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Duke University and the 2022 post-doctoral fellow at the Omohundro Institute; and Andrew Wehrman, Associate Professor of History at Central Michigan University and author of the forthcoming book, “The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the Revolutionary Era”.

What You’ll Discover

The suspected origins of the variola virus, or Smallpox
The suspected origins of the procedure of inoculation
What it was like to have Smallpox and how it was treated
When and how Europeans learned about inoculation
When and how Smallpox made its way to North America
How an epidemic of Smallpox was different in the colonies versus mainland England
Cotton Mather and his involvement in the 1721 Inoculation Controversy
The religious, scientific, and racial debates behind the Inoculation Controversy
The 1721 Boston Smallpox Epidemic
Zabdiel Boylston’s Inoculation Research