A popular alternative to vaccination in the nineteenth century was variolation, the practice of purposefully infecting a person with a mild case of smallpox. Both vaccination and variolation had their dangers. Both could cause high fevers, both could result in infection, and both could pass diseases like syphilis. But variolation, which produced an illness that tended to be fatal in about 1 to 2 percent of its cases, was more dangerous than vaccination.
