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Friday 26 July 2013

Smallpox: Daniel Sutton and Ingatestone

Smallpox inoculation is one of the topics covered in 'The Local Historian' (May 2013, Volume 43 No. 2).  The author, Mary South, mentions a Daniel Sutton: "the Suffolk surgeon ... perfected a simpler and safer technique using lighter incisions, and serum from immature pustules." (p.122).   Of course inoculation is entirely different from vaccination, and was quite controversial in the 1760s.  "Daniel Sutton started an establishment for the cure in Ingatestone in 1763", E E Wilde wrote. She devoted a chapter in her book 'Ingatestone and the Great Essex Road' which marks its centenary this year. "Hither flocked thousands of people to him during the next few years, and he was quite as successful as his father, for during this time he treated 20,000 people, of whom not one died" (Wilde 1913, 261). 

Sources: 
Mary South.  Smallpox inoculation campaigns in eighteenth-century Southampton, Salisbury and Winchester
E E Wilde.  Ingatestone and the Great Essex Road, with Fryerning (1913)

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