I was looking through the Annals of Maryland Medicine, 1799-1899, this morning and came across this little reminder of how long we've had vaccines in the United States, and how incredibly important they are.
In the 1813, the US Government, as mentioned, established the Vaccine Institute. Dr. John Crawford, a faculty member of the new medical school in Baltimore, knew that his brother back in England was vaccinating his patients against cow pox.
Dr. Crawford's brother soaked some cloth in the pox, dried it and sealed it with varnish. The pox was potent enough that when it finally arrived by letter in Baltimore, the pox was still contagious. Dr. Crawford re-hydrated it and then made a small cut between his patients' thumb and forefinger and ran a thread soaked in the pox through the cut.
This was a rudimentary vaccine, which went on to prevent thousands of deaths in Baltimore alone.
Make of this what you will, but we've been vaccinating people in Baltimore for more than two hundred years.
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