Description

The physician and botanist William Woodville (1752-1805), a proponent of inoculation against smallpox, was in 1791 appointed physician to the London Smallpox and Inoculation Hospital. Five years later, Edward Jenner announced his experiments with vaccination - inoculation with the much milder cowpox, which conveyed immunity to smallpox without the attendant risk of catching the often fatal disease. Woodville eagerly pursued trials using vaccination, and published the results in this 1799 work, which describes two hundred cases where patients (usually children) were vaccinated with matter obtained from either cows or other cowpox sufferers, and supplies a table of the patterns of infection from person to person. Most of these patients were later tested by inoculation with smallpox, and none caught the disease. This demonstration of the safety and efficacy of vaccination led to its much wider adoption, to which Woodville gave practical support in both England and France.