author
Daniel Sutton
1735–1819
Best remembered for transforming smallpox inoculation in the 18th century, this Suffolk-born surgeon helped make a feared procedure quicker, gentler, and far more widely used. Though later overshadowed by Edward Jenner, his work was an important step on the road to vaccination.
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About the author
Born in 1735, Daniel Sutton was an English surgeon and inoculator from the Sutton medical family, whose work became closely associated with new methods for preventing smallpox before vaccination existed.
In the 1760s, he refined and popularized what became known as the Suttonian method of inoculation. Contemporary and later medical accounts credit him and his family with helping to make the procedure safer, less painful, and more practical, and with bringing inoculation to large numbers of people at a time when smallpox was one of the deadliest diseases in Britain.
Sutton later described his approach in The Inoculator (1796), a book that has drawn renewed interest from historians of medicine. Modern writers have noted both his practical success and his close attention to observation and experiment, arguing that he deserves a larger place in the story of how preventive medicine developed before his death in 1819.