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Edward Jenner

ByMatthewThorn                                       January 10, 2008

     Jenner lived from1749 to 1823, and is accredited with creating the first vaccine, and finding a vaccine for small pox. He apprenticed under Dr. Ludlow for several years. When the doctor taught him all he could, Jenner went to London to begin his formal studies under John Hunter. Dr. Hunter was the leading surgeon of his day, and one of the greatest medical investigators of all time. Dr. Hunter recognized Jenner's talent, and once his training was over offered him a position as his assistant. Jenner also received an offer to be to come aboard a ship and be the ship's naturalist. Jenner refused both offers to return home to the village he grew up in.

     Once home he settled down, got married and started his practice. One day he remembered something he had heard while under Dr. Ludlow. He remembered something he had heard a milkmaid say while being treated for a cut on her hand. She had said that she could not contract smallpox because she had already had cowpox. After some consideration, he presented it to some of his friends, only to be met with ridicule from the doctors among them. This did not deter him, though. When it was a full formed medical opinion, he decided not to present it to doctors, but a poet he knew. After this he found confidence in his idea and set out to prove it.

     His friends found many flaws in his idea; they would point out cases where people had contracted cowpox, and then smallpox. It took Jenner five years of studying cow diseases to figure this out. He decided that there was more than one kind of smallpox, and that these people had had a different kind. He made a list of symptoms for the real cowpox, the kind that would prevent smallpox. Then his friends pointed out that in Newport there had been an epidemic of the true cowpox, and then a smallpox epidemic. Confronted with this new information, he started over, starting with the cows in Newport.

Then he progressed to hundreds of milkmaids and cows. Nine more years passed, before he figured out that real cowpox had several distinct phases.

     On May 14, 1796, a milk maid came into Jenner's office needing her hand to be bandaged because of cowpox. Jenner decided it was finally time to try his idea, so he called his caretaker's son into his office. He scrapped some of the cowpox puss into the boy's skin, giving him cowpox. Later on July 1^st, Jenner scraped smallpox into the boy's skin. This was not that unusual, you can only get smallpox once, and being infected with smallpox in this manner was believed to be milder than "catching" it. The boy didn't get smallpox! Jenner repeated the experiment twenty-three times before publishing it. He called his historic paper An Inquiry into the Cause and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae.

      Great commotion followed the announcement. Along came rumors like children who were vaccinated began to moo. The attitude began to change because of the need, though, and soon Jenner was the most talked about man in the world. Soon there was no part of the world that had not begun vaccinating against smallpox. The new country of the United States was unsure of the vaccination at first, but when President Thomas Jefferson had himself vaccinated, the country followed. Jenner began receiving gifts from all around the world. He received a diamond ring from the Empress of Russia, an American Indian chief sent him a wampum belt, Napoleon released two prisoners because they were friends of Jenner's, and in Germany the day of the boy's vaccination was celebrated as a national holiday.

     That was the end of smallpox; Jenner's vaccine was in use every where around the world. Jenner had killed a disease.