Hey,
I'm more or less not completely sure of this, but I found something interesting in my textbook:
"Hardly any infectious diseases could be cured, though inoculation against smallpox spread from the Middle East to Europe in the early eighteenth century, thanks largely to the efforts of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762). IN 1716, Montagu accompanied her husband to Constantinople, where he took up a post as British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. She returned in 1718, after witnessing firsthand the Turkish use of inoculation. When a new smallpox epidemic threatened England in 1721, she called on her physician to inoculate her daughter. Two patients died after inoculation in the following months, prompting clergymen and physicians to attack the practice, which remained in dispute for decades. Inoculation against smallpox began to spread more widely after 1796, when the English physician Edward Jenner developed a serum based on cowpox, a milder disease. Many other diseases spread quickly in the unsanitary conditions of urban life. Ordinary people washed or changed clothes rarely, lived in overcrowded housing with poor ventilation, and got their water from contaminated sources such as refuse-filled rivers." (emphasis mine)(Hunt, p. 545)
Hunt, Lynn. "Ch. 17: The Atlantic System and Its Consequences: 1690-1740." The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures. 3rd ed. Vol. 2. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2009. 545. Print. Since 1500.
Kinda makes me wonder whether the modern day religious opposition to medicine originated with this. What do you guys think?
Oh, and speaking of Jenner, and depending on your definition of "vaccine":
NO, NOT ALL VACCINES WERE MADE BECAUSE OF EVOLUTION, MUCH LESS DARWINIAN EVOLUTION.
Thank you.
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