Vaccines in History 

China, about 1000 A.D.

   With smallpox raging, a monk blew a powder of ground, smallpox scabs into a patient's nose. The technique remained in use for centuries. 

Revolutionary War, 1777

   George Washington, who had smallpox as a young adult, ordered inoculations for some 40,000 men in the Continental Army. This involved cutting the skin and inserting diseased tissue from a smallpox patient. Washington wrote that should disease infect the army, "we should have more to dread from it, than from the Sword of the Enemy." 

Pasteur's Gamble, 1885  

   After a rabid dog bit a 9-year-old French boy, his mother took him to the Paris lab of Louis Pasteur, who was experimenting with a vaccine made from afflicted rabbits. He agreed to test it on a human. The boy recovered and grew up to work at Pasteur's research institute, founded in 1887. 

Elvis Shows Them, 1956

   Millions of American children were getting the new polio vaccine. But authorities were worried that teens and adults didn't want the shot. Elvis Pressley, 21, got jabbed for the cameras on the Ed Sullivan Show. By 1960, polio cases were one-tenth of the 1950 level. 

SMITHONIAN

       Jimmy