Antisepsis Dbq

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Antisepsis wasn’t the only way to prevent illness. By the end of the 18th century people had found a way to try to prevent smallpox, a disease that had caused around 60 million deaths in Europe in that century alone. They had noticed that the survivors of smallpox never developed the disease again, so they began to scratch small pieces of smallpox sores into their skin, which would give them a mild case of smallpox, so they wouldn’t develop full-blown smallpox later. This was called variolation. They only problem was that sometimes it would cause a full-blown case instead of a mild one. Edward Jenner, an english doctor found a less risky form of variation. He learned that cowpox, a milder form of smallpox, they wouldn’t develop smallpox.

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