The physician and botanist William Woodville (1752-1805), a proponent of inoculation against smallpox, was in 1791 appointed physician to the London Smallpox and Inoculation Hospital. Five years later, Edward Jenner announced his experiments with vaccination - inoculation with the much milder cowpox, which conveyed immunity to smallpox without the attendant risk of catching the often fatal disease. Woodville eagerly pursued trials using vaccination, and published the results in this 1799 work, which describes two hundred cases where patients (usually children) were vaccinated with matter...