‘Buying the pox’ in 18th century

A doctor vaccinating a woman in the valleys in 1962

Before vaccination became widely available, people – especially the poor – had to resort to other ways of protecting themselves against smallpox. Maisie May of Leeds University (later at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine in Oxford) explored these options in a paper published in 1997: Inoculating the urban poor in the late 18th Century.

She described the practice of ‘buying the pox’. She quotes a Dr Perrot Williams of Pembrokeshire who wrote to the Royal Society in 1723 about the case of a young woman he had interviewed.

Source: The British Journal for the History of Science , Sep., 1997, Vol. 30, No. 3, Student Papers (Sep., 1997), pp. 291-305