 The invention of the smallpox vaccine goes back to the late 18th century and English physician Edward Jenner. It's a story of both reassurance and concern today, says Sam Lemley, curator of special collections at Carnegie Mellon University, which has Jenner's 1798 treatise on the subject. Scientific discoveries can come from unexpected places, but resistance to new ideas can also block their adoption, Lemley says. Jenner heard that dairy-maids and farm workers who got cowpox didn't get smallpox. Jenner took a series of trials and discovered that injecting the pus from a cowpox sore could provide immunity to smallpox. I think that his discoveries were met with a lot of skepticism at first. So the book was actually self-published. When Jenner submitted his discoveries to the Royal Society, they rejected it for publication in their journal. After publication, the religious establishment was hesitant to accept vaccination as a treatment because it seemed so unnatural. Charlottens will claim to be able to do it and end up infecting people, so people didn't trust it at first. The thought that I have in reading about Jenner is that it's a source of reassurance in some ways, in part because vaccines, the original vaccine came from such an unexpected place and source, you know, cows. I think that that's true of so many medical advancements. The concern, of course, is the public reaction to the successful introduction of a COVID-19 vaccine. Will everyone sort of sign up and will everyone agree to take the vaccine to protect the community and those that are immunocompromised and can't be vaccinated?