London, with a population estimated at three quarters of a million and after fifty years of inoculation in England, recorded well over a thousand deaths from smallpox. This was less than the previous major epidemic twenty-one years before, but still considered average.

The Public Health Act (Scotland) provided for the setting up of isolation hospitals: local smallpox was eradicated in seven years from this Act, after 34 years of compulsory vaccination had failed.

Carolan was born in 1670, and blinded by smallpox at the age of eighteen. His musical style blends the baroque (modern) with the ancient. Mary Delany was one of his patrons.

The ghost (supposed to be that of a young woman who had recently died while pregnant) appeared to a girl in whose family home the woman had lodged while living, to accuse her lover of her murder. The lover claimed that he had been devoted to her (they would have been married but for the prohibition on marrying a deceased wife's sister) and that she died of smallpox. But the allegation investigated was that of a ghost, not that of a murder.

William Duke of Gloucester , born in 1689, longest-surviving child of the future Queen Anne , died of smallpox.

The Vaccination Act made vaccination against smallpox compulsory for everyone in the United Kingdom, and provided for administering it gratis under the Poor Law.