Definition of "inoculate"

But you would not willingly thus give up the Cause; therefore endeavour to draw others into your Assistance, and venture to assert, that by the Account Dr. Nettleton gives, as also by the best Observation upon those who have been Inoculated in this City, scarcely a fourth part of them have had a true and genuine Small Pox.

1722, John Crawford, The Case of Inoculating the Small-pox Consider'd: And Its Advantages Asserted; in a Review of Dr. Wagstaffe's Letter. Wherein Every Thing that Author Has Advanced Against It, is Fully Confuted: and Inoculation Proved a Safe, Beneficial, and Laudable Practice.

The sense that it takes outrageous fortune to get inoculated echoes here in the Bay Area, where pharmacies have canceled flu-shot clinics, doctors turn away pleading patients and health officials are reduced to telling panicked callers that they should practice good personal hygiene.

2004 October 29, Marco R. Della Cava, “Vaccine shortage pricks tempers”, in Statesman Journal, volume 152, number 214, Salem, OR, page 2A

And in Aprill figtreen inoculate

c. 1420, anonymous author, edited by Barton Lodge, On husbondrie‎, Published for the Early English Text Society, by N. Trübner & Co., translation of original by Rutilius Taurus Aemilianus Palladius, published 1872

For vertue cannot ſo innocculate our old ſtocke, but we ſhall relliſh of it.

c. 1599–1602 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, [Act III, scene i], page 265, line 118

The Church tries to inoculate humanity with the imaginary goodness drawn down from a fabulous heaven, and from a priest-manufactured God.

1860, John Watts, The Christian Doctrine of Man's Depravity Refuted, Watts & Company, page 14