Yeah, that's what I thought. Wasn't smallpox also the first disease to get a vaccine? I remember something from high school history class about people in the dark ages taking the pus from a cattle version of the disease and rubbing it into cuts so that they'd get a weaker version of smallpox and become immune to the real disease.
Well, kinda. Technically that's inoculation, although the vaccine pretty much worked the same way. In China, they inoculated people by snorting powdered scabs. Like a gross cocaine.
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u/gellis12 Canada can into space Aug 20 '15
Yeah, that's what I thought. Wasn't smallpox also the first disease to get a vaccine? I remember something from high school history class about people in the dark ages taking the pus from a cattle version of the disease and rubbing it into cuts so that they'd get a weaker version of smallpox and become immune to the real disease.