Known since antiquity, the first description of smallpox comes from Rhazes (864-925), in a text held at the Library of Pharmaceutical and Pharmacological Sciences of the University of Padova (digital copy by Richardi Mead ... opera... 3. De variolis et morbillis. Accessit Rhazis inter Arabas celeberrimi, de iisdem morbis commentarius. Parisiis: apud Gulielmum Cavelier, 1751). The proposed therapy, to keep the patient warm to increase sweating to purge the humours, was challenged only by Syndheman (1624-1689), who, on the contrary, urged the creation of conditions that would bring down the patient’s fever, in ventilated areas, with respect to the patient which set this English Hippocrates apart from others.

Smallpox became endemic in Europe in the fifteenth century, but its maximum virulence developed in the eighteenth century. It is estimated that the disease killed around 400,000 Europeans every year in the eighteenth century and was responsible for one third of all cases of blindness (Fenner p. 231). In the last two decades of the eighteenth century, it killed more than 36,000 people in London, 90% of whom were under the age of five: one in ten people died of smallpox.

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... to the discovery of the vaccine