Question: How was the first disease cured?

Pete Etchells answered on 24 Apr 2012:

Great question! This isn’t my area of expertise, so I don’t know the full details, but I think the first disease that was completely cured by humans was smallpox. This was a really dangerous disease, responsible for killing millions of people in the 18th and 19th Centuries. It was cured by a man called Edward Jenner, who invented the vaccine. Basically, he noticed that people who caught cowpox (which was very similar to smallpox, but not as dangerous) didn’t seem to catch smallpox. He later found out that this was because the immune system could learn how to stop cowpox without the person getting killed, and because smallpox was similar, that meant that the immune system could afterwards deal with that too. Eventually, everyone became vaccinated against smallpox, and because there was no one left who could be a host for the disease, it was cured! Pretty cool, huh?