In the late 18th century, smallpox was one of the deadliest diseases in Europe. Dr. Edward Jenner studied many, many people who were suffering from smallpox but he made no progress. He felt stuck and saw no way to solve the problem. Then he suddenly had an idea. What if instead of studying the people who were sick with smallpox, he switched his attention to those who didn't have it. For example, women who worked with cows seemed never to get smallpox. It turned out that cowpox, which is harmless, gives protection against the deadly smallpox and soon Jenner had developed a way of preventing this horrible illness. When facing a difficult problem, it's common to get stuck and feel like things are hopeless. But when Dr. Jenner got to this point, he stopped fighting the problem and simply changed his point of view. He stopped looking at people who were sick and started looking at people who weren't. A philosopher named Edward de Bono has come up with a technique for changing our point of view. He calls his technique "Lateral Thinking". The traditional western way of approaching a problem is to fight it. We see this aggressive attitude in sayings like, "when the going gets tough, the tough get going." Dr. de Bono calls this approach vertical thinking. Lateral thinking is a new way of thinking about things — a way that avoids fighting problems and instead tries to solve them by going around them. The principle behind lateral thinking is that the more you fight a problem, the more anxious you become and the less chance you have of solving it.