Card Commemorating a Test of the Effectiveness of Vaccination onTwelve Children in Milton, Massachusetts

1809

Thirty-five years have passed since the 33rd World Health Assembly declared the world free of smallpox, an infectious disease that had plagued humankind for most of written history. This momentous achievement was the result of a massive global eradication campaign begun in the late 1960s, but its real beginnings can be traced back much further—to a medical discovery made in the English countryside, which spread across the Atlantic and to the small towns of the new republic. This commemorative vaccination card is a small piece of evidence of this long and rich history.