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| Joined: | Sun Sep 23rd, 2007 |
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I saw the first 2 parts of the Adams series tonight (7 in all). This is a fabulous movie--not a documentary, but really a drama. So far my only teeny, tiny criticism, is the accents in the Continental Congress: the Southerners had almost none, the MA delegates none, and, as I remember James Wilson was prez and he was Scottish as was John Witherspoon. Mortonson, a NJ delegate, I think, may have been Swedish. It would have been nice to showcase the international flavor of the group, as all were not born in America.
With that said, I double checked the difference between small pox inocluation, used during the Amer Rev and vacciation, developed by Edward Jenner ca. 1788. In the drama Abigal and children are inoculated with the actual small pox virus which was why it was dangerous. Jenner, however, discovered that cox pox will develop effective antibodies against small pox and thus developed the first vaccine (from the Latin word, vaccu, for cow), a little later.
However, according to a British website, it was actually Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , the wife of the British ambassador to Turkey, who brought the first small pox inoculation method to England in 1721. So here's another historic first we women do not get credit for along with, off the top of my head: Catherine Greene's (widow of Gen. Nathanael) financing of Eli Whitney's cotton gin; Martha Coston's development of the Coston night signaling device used by the US Navy and CG from the Civil war into the 1930s (see her chapters on "Springing to the call" at nymas.org); Hedy Lamarr's patent for radio frequency hopping for antijamming and guided missiles (in my upcoming WWII revised edition).
Cheers!
CKL