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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBen Franklin's bitter regret that he didn't immunize his 4-year-old son against smallpox
Five weeks had passed since the death of Benjamin Franklins son, and rumors were swirling. Four-year-old Francis Franky Franklin had died after being inoculated for smallpox, the rumor went, and now his pro-inoculation father was trying to hide it.
The gossip reached such a point that on Dec. 30, 1736, the grieving father, then 30, confronted it in the pages of his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette.
Inasmuch as some People are, by that [rumor] ... deterd from having that Operation performd on their Children, he wrote, I do hereby sincerely declare, that he was not inoculated, but receivd the Distemper in the common Way of Infection.
It must have been hard to admit Franklin had long advocated inoculation as a safe and beneficial practice that his own son had gone unprotected.
I intended to have my Child inoculated, he explained, as soon as he should have recovered sufficient Strength from a Flux [diarrhea] with which he had been long afflicted.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/08/14/ben-franklin-smallpox-son-vaccine/
Timewas
(2,195 posts)According to this the smallpox vaccine was not discovered until 1796 which puts this story 60yrs before that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine
Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin
(108,035 posts)Washington had his troops inoculated this way.
https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/medicine/smallpox-and-story-vaccination
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/washington-inoculates-army
krawhitham
(4,644 posts)Variolation was the method of inoculation first used to immunize individuals against smallpox (Variola) with material taken from a patient or a recently variolated individual, in the hope that a mild, but protective, infection would result.
The method was first used in China, India, parts of Africa and the Middle East before it was introduced into England and North America in the 1720s in the face of some opposition.
Timewas
(2,195 posts)Early form of vaccination... Thank You
Response to Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin (Original post)
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