Jenner, an English barber and chiropodist, is usually credited with the discovery of vaccination.  The doubtful honor, however, belongs in reality to an old Circassian woman who, according to the historian Le Duc, in the year 1672 startled Constantinople with the announcement that the Virgin Mary had revealed to her an unfailing preventive against the smallpox.

Her specific was inoculation with the genuine smallpox virus.  But even with her the idea was not an original one, because the principle of isopathy (curing a disease with its own disease products) was explicitly taught a hundred years before that by Paracelsus, the great genius of the Renaissance of learning of the Middle Ages.  But even he was only voicing the secret teachings of ancient folklore, sympathy healing and magic dating back to the Druids and Seers of ancient Britain and Germany.

The Circassian seeress cut a cross in the flesh of people and inoculated this wound with the smallpox virus.  Together with this she prescribed prayer, abstinence from meat and fasting for forty days.

As at that time smallpox was a terrible and widespread scourge, the practice of inoculation was carried all over Europe.  At first the operation was performed by women and laymen; but when vaccination became popular and people were willing to pay for it, the doctors began to incorporate it into their regular practice.

Popular superstitions run a very similar course to epidemics.  They have a period of inception, of virulence and of abatement.  As germs and bacteria become inactive and die a natural death in their own poisonous excreta, so popular superstitions die as a natural result of their own falsities and exaggerations.

It soon became evident that inoculation with the virus did not prevent smallpox, but, on the contrary, frequently caused it; and therefore the practice gradually fell into disuse, only to be revived by Jenner about one hundred years later in a modified form.  He substituted cowpox virus for smallpox virus.

Modern allopathy, in applying the isopathic principle, gives large and poisonous doses of virus, lymph, serums and antitoxins, while homeopathy, as did ancient mysticism, applies the isopathic remedies in highly diluted and triturated doses only.

From England vaccination gradually spread over the civilized world and during the nineteenth century the smallpox disease (variola) constantly diminished in virulence and frequency until today it has become of comparatively rare occurrence.

“Therefore vaccination has exterminated smallpox,” say the disciples of Jenner.