The American physician Benjamin Waterhouse (1754-1846) introduced cowpox vaccination against smallpox in the Boston area in 1800.

Benjamin Waterhouse was born at Newport, R.I., on March 4, 1754, the son of Timothy Waterhouse, a chairmaker. His mother was a cousin of Dr. John Fothergill, an eminent London physician. This family connection, plus the influence of the Scottish physicians practicing in Newport, led Waterhouse into medicine as an apprentice to Dr. John Haliburton. He spent most of 1777-1778 studying medicine in London and Edinburgh, then went to Leiden in late 1778.

Waterhouse returned to Newport in 1782 and joined the medical department of Harvard College the next year as professor of the theory and practice of physic. He married Elizabeth Oliver in 1788; she died in 1815, after giving birth to six children, and he remarried in 1819.

In 1799 Waterhouse learned of Edward Jenner's work in England, using cowpox as a vaccination against smallpox. Waterhouse immediately...