The Revolutionary War was fought from 1776 to 1783. According to Wikipedia (yeah, I know, Wikipedia) the first vaccine of any type (yes, it was for smallpox) was developed in 1796, in England, by Edward Jenner. The first smallpox vaccine was administered in the US in 1799, by physician Valentine Seamen to his children.
The term vaccine was coined by Jenner in 1798. This claim doesn't pass the smell test to me.
Every article I searched on small pox and Washington were made recently. Dates on every article i found one after abother were all new dates.
See my link below: I was working on a response to that-and used the CDC for the same date.
However, it is possible that Washington ordered the “variolation”, but I had never heard or read anything about it before. Besides it’s not news that the military often gets stuck taking vaccines that the public doesn’t have to take.
I object to mandatory vaccines, vaccines should be voluntary and based on informed consent-just like any other medical procedure.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3862790/posts?page=408#408
RE Revolutionary War Inoculation.
A lot of soldiers were saved from smallpox, but a lot were also killed through the inoculation. What they did was cut the upper arm of a soldier then scoop out some pus from a boil of an infected soldier and smear it in the open wound.
The first time I ever heard this claim was years ago and I think it was when I read Ron Chernow's biography, "Washington". It's true but there is debate about whether or not he inoculated the whole army. He did, however, inoculate new recruits, and then quarantined them until they recovered. They were inoculated by making a small incision in the arm and then rubbing a bit of pus on the cut from an infected person. It nearly always resulted in the recruit contracting the disease, but in a milder form.