FOR thousands of years, smallpox was one of the great scourges of mankind.
It left millions dead and many of those that survived terribly disfigured and often blind.
In 1798 a Gloucestershire doctor, Edward Jenner, inoculated a related disease in cattle – known as cowpox – into the arm of James Phipps, the nine-year-old son of his gardener. Some weeks later he exposed him to the smallpox virus but he never developed the disease.
He called his process vaccination, from the Latin vacca for cow.
In 1853 Parliament passed the Vaccination Bill requiring every child to be vaccinated, with a penalty of £1 for parents who refused to do so.