Smallpox inoculation

“The discovery and implementation of smallpox inoculation from a folk practice to the medical triumph of the eighteenth century was certainly a global and transatlantic process, but Americans in the 1750s and 1770s cobbled together a shared history about the discovery of mankind’s greatest medical procedure, turning it into an all-American sure. . . . Americans used their claim to have invented inoculation to celebrate American achievement and ultimately to rationalize a revolution” (Wehrman, 126).