Vaccines How Smallpox Inoculations Helped Win the American Revolution Lessons to Apply to the COVID-19 Pandemic By Trisha Torrey facebook twitter linkedin Trisha Torrey is a patient empowerment and advocacy consultant. She has written several books about patient advocacy and how to best navigate the healthcare system. Learn about our editorial process Trisha Torrey Medically reviewed by Medically reviewed by Anju Goel, MD, MPH on April 14, 2020 linkedin Anju Goel, MD, MPH, is a board-certified physician who specializes in public health, communicable disease, diabetes, and health policy. Learn about our Medical Review Board Anju Goel, MD, MPH Updated on February 03, 2021 Print Vaccination can be a controversial topic to some, but America might never have won its independence without it. The story of George Washington inoculating his troops against smallpox illustrates why it is important to immunize enough people to keep diseases from spreading and altering the very course of history. Douglas Sacha / Getty Images Smallpox at Valley Forge History has shown us how the spread of disease could have altered the birth of a nation. During the winter at Valley Forge in 1776, George Washington decided to begin inoculating soldiers against smallpox, a disease he had experienced as a teenager in 1751 while visiting the island of Barbados. Washington's decision to inoculate his troops—using a process called variolation in which pus from an infected person is introduced into the body of an uninfected person—provided them protection from the growing epidemic and enabled them to fight to British forces and eventually win the war. Washington's revolutionary comrade, John Adams, was not so lucky. Unlike the troops at Valley Forces, Adams' troops had been forced to retreat from Quebec when half had fallen ill with smallpox. In the end, all but 50 of Washington's troops survived the smallpox epidemic. Had Adams taken the same actions and inoculated his troops, historians believed that Quebec could very well have become a part of the United States. The History of Vaccines and Vaccinations The Birth of Vaccination The practice of variolation was not a new concept; it had, in fact, been used for centuries all the way back to the Ottoman Empire. According to historians, the first widespread variolations in American colonies took place more than 50 years before Valley Forge when famed pamphleteer Cotton Mather introduced the practice during the smallpox epidemic of 1721. It was something he had reportedly learned from his slave, Onesimus, who had learned it himself in Africa. At the same time back in England, aristocrat Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was imploring the government to take the same action to protect British children from the smallpox epidemic in that country. She had witnessed the practice of variolation during a tour of Constantinople (now Istanbul) and even had it applied to her own three-year-old son back at home. Unlike Washington's response, however, Lady Montagu's actions were greeted by consternation and condemnation by many in the British public, leading some to form organizations specifically to fight the practice of inoculation. It was arguably one of the first organized examples of the anti-vaccination ("anti-vaxxing") movement we are witnessing today. Twenty years after Washington inoculated his troops in Valley Forge, British scientist Edward Jenner created the smallpox vaccine in 1796, the very first vaccine ever invented. Top 20 Vaccines You Should Know About Lessons Learned In the late 1700s, the idea of vaccination was new and untested, and a great many people were as afraid of the vaccine as they were of the disease. Today, the body of scientific evidence has shown that vaccines work, eliminating diseases like smallpox and diphtheria that once killed millions. Still, many people decline vaccination, believing conspiracy theories or unsupported claims of health risks (including that the MMR vaccine causes autism or that the COVID-19 vaccine changes a person's DNA). As a result of the growing anti-vaxxing movement, a disease like measles that was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000 has begun to re-emerge in local and regional outbreaks throughout the country. Should the same occur with COVID-19 vaccinations, there is a risk that the U.S. population—and the world population—will not achieve the herd immunity needed to effectively bring the pandemic under control. 5 Ways To Prepare for Your COVID-19 Vaccination A Word From Verywell Despite claims to the contrary, the benefits of vaccinations vastly outweigh the potential risks. Those recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) are considered essential to protecting our children and ourselves from diseases that can cause serious harm or re-emerge if we do not vaccinate ourselves. If uncertain what vaccines you or your child needs, speak to your doctor. You should also speak with a doctor if you are falling behind on your child's immunization schedule as additional doses or different vaccines may be needed. Immunization Schedule for Children in the US Was this page helpful? Thanks for your feedback! Sign up for our Health Tip of the Day newsletter, and receive daily tips that will help you live your healthiest life. Sign Up You're in! Thank you, {{form.email}}, for signing up. There was an error. Please try again. What are your concerns? Other Inaccurate Hard to Understand Submit Article Sources Verywell Health uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy. Liebowitz D. Smallpox vaccination: an early start of modern medicine in America. J Community Hosp Intern Med Perspect. 2017 Jan;7(1):61-3. doi:10.1080/20009666.2016.1273611 Boylston A. The origins of inoculation. J R Soc Med. 2012 Jul;105(7):309-13. doi:10.1258/jrsm.2012.12k044 Weiss RA, Esparza J. The prevention and eradication of smallpox: A commentary on Sloane (1755) An account of inoculation. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2015 Apr 19;370(1666):20140378. doi:10.1098/rstb.2014.0378 LaSalle G. Let's Talk Vaccines. Philadephia PA, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2019. Smith KA. Edward Jenner and the small pox vaccine. Front Immunol. 2011;2:21. doi:10.3389/fimmu.2011.00021 The Atlantic. The utter familiarity of even the strangest vaccine conspiracy theories. January 11, 2021. Feemster KA, Szipszkhy C. Resurgence of measles in the United States: How did we get here?. Curr Opin Pediatr 2020 Feb;32(1):139-144. doi:10.1097/MOP.0000000000000845