Abstract
It has been observed for centuries that a patient who survives an episode of certain infectious diseases such as smallpox or measles becomes immune for live against a further infection. For smallpox, the idea therefore arose to infect persons artificially by a “mild” form of the disease. This practice seems to have originated very early in China where dried smallpox scabs were blown into the nose of an individual who then contracted a mild form of the disease and was immune upon recovery. Starting in the eighteenth century, a modified procedure was used in Europe under the name “variolation” where the dried scabs were injected under the skin.
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© 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
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Krickeberg, K., Pham, V.T., Pham, T.M.H. (2012). Infectious Diseases: Modelling, Immunity. In: Epidemiology. Statistics for Biology and Health. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1205-2_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1205-2_5
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