Benjamin Waterhouse introduces Edward Jenner's method of…
1801 CE
Benjamin Waterhouse introduces Edward Jenner's method of cowpox vaccination in the United States once Thomas Jefferson becomes President in 1801.
He attempts to maintain a monopoly over the cowpox vaccine, for both financial reasons and to protect the vaccine from incompetent or fraudulent physicians.
Waterhouse makes the first vaccinations in the United States on four of his children.
He commissions a controlled experiment at the Boston Board of Health in which nineteen are vaccinated and two unvaccinated boys are exposed to the smallpox virus.
The vaccinated boys demonstrate immunity and the two unvaccinated boys succumb to the disease.
It is notable that Waterhouse added this control to the test involving the children of others but not to the test involving his own.
Waterhouse was born into a Quaker family, although he will never adopt the religion as his own.
His parents are Timothy Waterhouse, a chair maker who also serves on the Governor's Council, and Hannah Waterhouse.
His medical career had begun at age sixteen, when he apprenticed for a doctor in his hometown.
At age twenty-one, he left the United States to study medicine in Europe at several notable institutions, such as with Dr. John Fothergill in London, England.
He was also educated in Edinburgh and Leyden, where he received his medical degree.
While living in Holland, he had roomed with future U.S. president John Adams After returning to the United States in 1782, Waterhouse had joined the faculty of the new medical school at Harvard as one of three professors, including John Warren and Aaron Dexter, in the area of Theory and Practice of Physic.
He was also elected that same year as a Fellow at Rhode Island College (now "Brown University").
Waterhouse first wrote to his former roommate, hoping to spread the word about cowpox vaccinations preventing smallpox.
When he found President Adams unresponsive, he wrote a letter to Vice President Thomas Jefferson entitled, "A prospect of exterminating the smallpox."
Jefferson had replied with a letter dated Christmas Day, 1800, and soon offered his support.