Edward Jenner (1749-1823) English Physician - Smallpox Vaccination Pioneer

The First Vaccination - Dr. Edward Jenner by Georges Gaston Mélique

The First Vaccination -- Dr. Edward Jenner by Georges Gaston Melingue. GGA Image ID # 154121b8fd

Introduction and Brief Biography

Edward Jenner was an English country doctor who pioneered vaccination. Jenner's discovery in 1796 that inoculation with cowpox gave immunity to smallpox was an enormous medical breakthrough and has saved countless lives.

Edward Jenner was born on May 17, 1749, in the small village of Berkeley in Gloucestershire. From an early age Jenner was a keen observer of nature, and after nine years as a surgeon's apprentice, he went to St George's Hospital, London to study anatomy and surgery under the prominent surgeon John Hunter. After completing his studies, he returned to Berkeley to set up a medical practice where he stayed until his death in 1823.

Jenner worked in a rural community, and most of his patients were farmers or worked on farms with cattle. In the 18th century, smallpox was a widespread disease and was a significant cause of death.

The primary treatment was by a method which had brought success to a Dutch physiologist Jan Ingenhaus and was brought to England in 1721 from Turkey by Lady Mary Wortly Montague. This technique involved inoculating healthy people with substances from the pustules of those who had a mild case of the disease, but this often had fatal results.

The 1788 Smallpox Epidemic

In 1788 an epidemic of smallpox hit Gloucestershire, and during this outbreak, Jenner observed that those of his patients who worked with cattle and had come in contact with the much milder disease called cowpox never came down with smallpox. Jenner needed a way of showing that his theory actually worked.

Using Cowpox to Prevent Smallpox

Jenner was given the opportunity on the 14 May 1796, when a young milkmaid called Sarah Nelmes came to see him with sores on her hands like blisters. Jenner identified that she had caught cowpox from the cows she handled each day.

Jenner now had the opportunity to obtain the material to try out his theories. He carefully extracted some liquid from her sores and then took some fluid from the lesions of a patient with mild smallpox. Jenner believed that if he could inject someone with cowpox, the germs from the cowpox would make the body able to defend itself against the dangerous smallpox germs which he would inject later.

Dr. Edward Jenner

Jenner approached a local farmer called Phipps and asked him if he could inoculate his son James against smallpox. He explained to the farmer that if his theory was correct, James would never contract smallpox.

Surprisingly, the farmer agreed. Jenner made two small cuts on James's left arm. He then poured the liquid from Sarah's cowpox sores into the open wounds which he bandaged. James went down with cowpox but was not very ill. Six weeks later when James had recovered, Jenner vaccinated him again, this time with the smallpox virus.

This was a dangerous experiment. If James lived, Jenner would have found a way of preventing smallpox. If James developed smallpox and died, he would be a murderer.

Edward Jenner

Edward Jenner
From the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Despite all efforts to check it by medication and by direct inoculation, it swept now and then over the earth as an all devastating pestilence, and year by year it claimed one-tenth of all the beings in Christendom by death as its average quota of victims. "

From small-pox and love but few remain free," ran the old saw. A pitted face was almost as much a matter of course a hundred years ago as a smooth one is today.

Results of the Experiment

To Jenner's relief, James did not catch smallpox. His experiment had worked. In 1798 after carrying out further successful tests, he published his findings: An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, a Disease Known by the Name of Cow Pox.

Jenner called his idea "vaccination" from the word vaccinia which is Latin for cowpox. Jenner also introduced the term virus. Jenner found a great deal of skepticism to his ideas and was subject to much ridicule.

A cartoon was drawn, showing cows coming out of various parts of people's bodies after they had been vaccinated with cowpox. However, Jenner persevered, and eventually, doctors found that vaccination did work and by 1800 most were using it.

Jenner was awarded £30,000 by Parliament to enable him to continue carrying out his tests. Deaths from smallpox plummeted and vaccination spread through Europe and North America. Jenner died in Berkeley on January 26, 1823, aged 74.

Biography Author Unknown.

Awards and Grants to Dr. Edward Jenner (Partial Listing)

Dr. Edward Jenner was the recipient of many awards, lifetime and posthumous including:

  • 1789 - Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine - an award to those whose discoveries and work have proved to be significant advances in human health.- acclaimed scientists Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur among others also received this award.
  • 1801 Diploma of Fellow of the Royal Society of Sciences at Gottingen, September 14.
  • 1802 The British Parliament awards him £10,000
  • 1802 Awarded Honorary Member of Guy's Hospital Physical Society - Diploma of Fellow of the Physical Society of Guy's Hospital.
  • 1802 Naval Medical Officers Award for Saving Many Lives during the Napoleonic War
  • 1802 Manchester Infirmary: Certificate of the success of Vaccine Inoculation, and complimentary address
  • 1802 Edinburgh (March 7) Diploma of Fellow of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh.
  • 1802 Paris - Diploma of Foreign Associate of the Medical Society of Paris.
  • 1802 Massachusetts (May 25) Diploma of Fellow of the American Society of Arts and Sciences in Massachusetts.
  • 1902 Paris (July 29) Official Letter of respect and congratulation upon the general success of Vaccination in France, from the Central Committee of Vaccination.
  • 1803 Freedom of the City Award, City of London, England
  • 1807 British Parliament Grant of £ 20,000
  • 1821 London (March 16) Appointment of Dr. Edward Jenner to be Physician Extraordinary of the King of Great Britain.

Edward Jenner Biography by John Timbs, F.S.A.

Edited by Charles F. Horne 1894

DR. EDWARD JENNER

By JOHN TIMBS, F.S.A.

(1749-1823)

Dr. Edward Jenner

Few of the many thousand ills which human flesh is heir to, have spread such devastation among the family of man as small-pox. Its universality has ranged from the untold tribes of savages to the silken baron of civilization; and its ravages on life and beauty have been shown in many a sad tale of domesticates suffering.

To stay the destroying hand of such a scourge, which by some has been identified with the Plague of Athens, was reserved for Edward Jenner, the discoverer of vaccination.

The great fact can, however, be traced half a century before Jenner's time. In the journal of John Byron, F.R.S., under date June 3, 1725, it is recorded that :

"At a meeting of the Royal Society, Sir Isaac Newton presiding, Dr. Jurin read a case of small-pox, where a girl who had been inoculated and had been vaccinated, was tried and had them not again; but another [a] boy, caught the small-pox from this girl, and had the confluent kind and died."

This case occurred at Hanover. The inoculation of the girl seems to have failed entirely; it was suspected that she had not taken the true small-pox; doubts, however, were removed, as a boy, who daily saw the girl, fell ill and died, " having had a very bad small-pox of the confluent sort."

First Use of the Word Vaccination

This is the first use of the word vaccination, or, more familiarly, cow-pox, which is an eruption arising from the insertion into the system of matter obtained from the eruption on the teats and udders of cows, and especially in Gloucestershire; it is also frequently denominated vaccine matter; and the whole affair, inoculation and its consequences, is called vaccination, from the Latin vacca, a cow.

It is admitted that Jenner's merit lay in the scientific application of his knowledge of the fact that the chapped hands of milkers of cows sometimes proved a preventive of small-pox, and from those of them whom he endeavored to inoculate resisting the infection.

These results were probably known far beyond Jenner's range, and long before his time; for we have respectable testimony of their having come within the observation of a Cheshire gentleman, who had been informed of them shortly after settling on his estate in Prestbury parish, in or about 1740.

Portrait of Dr. Edward Jenner, ca 1800.

Portrait of Dr. Edward Jenner, ca 1800. From a Painting by John Raphael Smith. GGA Image ID # 1cf8356365

Jenner's Genius for Observation, Analogy, and Experiment

This does not in the least detract from Jenner's merit, but shows that to his genius for observation, analogy, and experiment, we are indebted for this application of a simple fact, only incidentally remarked by others, but by Jenner rendered the stepping-stone to his great discovery—or, in other words, extending its benefits from a single parish in Gloucestershire to the whole world.

We agree with a contemporary, that, "among all the names which ought to be consecrated by the gratitude of mankind, that of Jenner stands pre-eminent. It would be difficult, we are inclined to say impossible, to select from the catalogue of benefactors to human nature an individual who has contributed so largely to the preservation of life, and to the alleviation of suffering.

Into whatever corner of the world the blessing of printed knowledge has penetrated, there also will the name of Jenner be familiar; but the fruits of his discovery have ripened in barbarous soils, where books have never been opened, and where the savage does not pause to inquire from what source he has derived relief.

No improvement in the physical sciences can bear a parallel with that which ministers in every part of the globe to the prevention of deformity, and, in a great proportion, to the exemption from actual destruction."

The ravages which the small-pox formerly committed are scarcely conceived or recollected by the present generation. An instance of death occurring after vaccination is now eagerly seized and commented upon; yet seventy years have not elapsed since this disease might fairly be termed the scourge of mankind, and an enemy more extensive and more insidious than even the plague.

A family blighted in its fairest hopes through this terrible visitation was an everyday spectacle : the imperial House of Austria lost eleven of its offspring in fifty years. This instance is mentioned because it is historical; but in the obscure and unrecorded scenes of life this pest was often a still more merciless intruder.

Biographical Sketch

Edward Jenner was the third son of the Vicar of Berkeley, in Gloucestershire, where he was born, May 17, 1749. Before he was nine years of age he showed a growing taste for natural history, in forming a collection of the nests of the dormouse; and when at school at Cirencester he was fond of searching for fossils, which abound in that neighborhood.

He was articled to a surgeon at Sudbury, near Bristol, and at the end of his apprenticeship came to London and studied under John Hunter, with whom he resided as a pupil for two years and formed a lasting friendship with that great man. In 1773 he returned to his native village, and commenced practice as a surgeon and apothecary, with great success.

Nevertheless, he abstracted from the fatigues of country practice sufficient time to form a museum of specimens of comparative anatomy and natural history.

He was much liked, was a man of lively and simple humor, and loved to tell his observation of nature in homely verse; and in 1788 he communicated to the Royal Society his curious paper on the cuckoo.

At the same time he carried to London a drawing of the casual disease, as seen on the hands of the milkers, and showed it to Sir Everard Home and to others.

John Hunter had alluded frequently to the fact in his lectures; Dr. Adams had heard of the cow-pox both from Hunter and Clive, and mentions it in his "Treatise on Poisons," published in 1795, three years previous to Jenner's own publication. Still, no one had the courage or the penetration to prosecute the inquiry except Jenner.

Jenner now resolved to confine his practice to medicine, and obtained, in 1792, a degree of M.D. from the University of St. Andrew's. We now arrive at the great event of Jenner's life.

Small Pox Observations and Discovery

While pursuing his professional education in the house of his master at Sudbury, a young countrywoman applied for advice; and the subject of small-pox being casually mentioned, she remarked she could not take the small-pox because she had had cow-pox; and he then learnt that it was a popular notion in that district, that milkers who had been infected with a peculiar eruption which sometimes occurred on the udder of the cow, were completely secure against the small-pox.

The medical gentlemen of the district told Jenner that the security which it gave was not perfect; and Sir George Baker, the physician, treated it as a popular error.

But Jenner thought otherwise; and although John Hunter and other eminent surgeons disregarded the subject, Jenner pursued it. He found at Berkeley that some persons, to whom it was impossible to give small-pox by inoculation, had had cowpox; but that others who had had cow-pox yet received small-pox.

Cow Pox and Small Pox

This led to the doctor's discovery that the cow was subject to a certain eruption, which had the power of guarding from small-pox; and next, that it might be possible to propagate the cow-pox, and with it security from the small-pox, first from the cow to the human body, and thence from one person to another.

Here, then, was an important discovery, that matter from the cow, intentionally inserted into the body, gave a slighter ailment than when received otherwise, and yet had the same effect of completely preventing small-pox.

But of what advantage was it for mankind that the cows of Gloucestershire possessed a matter thus singularly powerful ? How were persons living at a distance to derive benefit from this great discovery ? Dr. Jenner, having inoculated several persons from a cow, took the matter from the human vesicles thus produced, and inoculated others, and others from them again; thus making it pass in succession through many individuals, and all with the same good effect in preventing small-pox.

The Trial for the Small Pox Vaccine

An opportunity occurred of making a trial of the latter on May 14, 1796 (a day still commemorated by the annual festival at Berlin), when a boy, aged eight years, was vaccinated with matter from the hands of a milkmaid; the experiment succeeded, and he was inoculated for small-pox on July 1st following without the least effect. Dr. Jenner then extended his experiments, and in 1798 published his first memoir on the subject.

He had originally intended to communicate his results to the Royal Society, but was admonished not to do so, lest it should injure the character which he had previously acquired among scientific persons by his paper on the natural history of the cuckoo. In the above work Dr. Jenner announces the security against small-pox afforded by the true cowpox, and also traces the origin of that disease in the cow to a similar affection of the heel of the horse.

The method, however, met with much opposition, until, in the following year, thirty-three leading physicians and forty eminent surgeons of London signed an earnest expression of their confidence in the efficacy of the cow-pox. The royal family of England exerted themselves to encourage Jenner; the Duke of Clarence, the Duke of York, the king, the Prince of Wales, and the queen bestowed great attention upon Jenner.

The incalculable utility of cow-pox was at last evinced; and observation and experience furnished evidence enough to satisfy the Baillies and Heberdens, the Monros and Gregorys of Britain, as well as the physicians of Europe, India, and America. The new practice now began to supersede the old plan pursued by the Small-pox Hospital, which had been founded for inoculation. The two systems were each pursued until 1808, when the hospital governors discontinued small-pox inoculation.

A committee of Parliament was now appointed to consider the claims of Jenner upon the gratitude of his country. It was clearly proved that he had converted into scientific demonstration a tradition of the peasantry.

Two parliamentary grants, of £ 10,000 and £ 20,000, were voted to him. In 1808 the National Vaccine Establishment was formed by Government, and placed under his direction. Honors were profusely showered upon him by various foreign princes, as well as by the principal learned bodies of Europe.

Later Years

Dr. Jenner passed the remainder of his years principally at Berkeley and at Cheltenham, continuing to the last his inquiries on the great object of his life. He died at Berkeley, in February, 1823, at the green old age of seventy-four : his remains lie in the chancel of the parish church of Berkeley.

A marble statue by Sievier has been erected to his memory in the nave of Gloucester Cathedral; and another statue of him has been placed in a public building at Cheltenham.

Medals in Honor of Jenner

Five medals have been struck in honor of Jenner : three by the German nation; one by the surgeons of the British navy; and the fifth by the London Medical Society.

The Genius of Dr. Jenner

Dr. Jenner was endowed with a rare quality of mind, which it may be both interesting, and beneficial to sketch. A singular originality of thought was his leading characteristic. He appeared to have naturally inherited what in others is the result of protracted study.

He seemed to think from originality of perception alone, and not from induction. He arrived by a glance at inferences which would have occupied the laborious conclusions of most men.

In human and animal pathology, in comparative anatomy, and in geology, he perceived facts and formed theories instantaneously, and with a spirit of inventive penetration which distanced the slower approaches of more learned men. But if his powers of mind were singularly great, the qualities which accompanied them were still more felicitous.

He possessed the most singular amenity of disposition with the highest feeling, the rarest simplicity united to the highest genius. In the great distinction and the superior society to which his discovery introduced him, the native cast of his character was unchanged.

Among the great monarchs of Europe, who, when in Great Britain, solicited his acquaintance, he was the unaltered Dr. Jenner of his birthplace.

In the other moral points of his character, affection, friendship, beneficence, and liberality were pre-eminent. In religion, his belief was equally remote from laxity and fanaticism; and he observed to an intimate friend, not long before his death, that he wondered not that the people were ungrateful to him for his discovery, but he was surprised that they were ungrateful to God for the benefits of which he was the humble means.

Edward Jenner - 1897 - Science at the Beginning of the 20th Century

All advances in science have a bearing, near or remote, on the welfare of our race; but it remains to credit to the closing decade of the eighteenth century a discovery which, in its power of direct and immediate benefit to humanity, surpasses any other discovery of this or any previous epoch. Needless to say I refer to Jenner's discovery of the method of preventing small-pox by inoculation with the virus of cow-pox. It detracts nothing from the merit of this discovery to say that the preventive power of accidental inoculation had long been rumored among the peasantry of England.

Such vague, unavailing half-knowledge is often the forerunner of fruitful discovery. To all intents and purposes Jenner's discovery was original and unique. Neither, considered as a perfected method, was it in any sense an accident. It was a triumph of experimental science; how great a triumph it is difficult now to understand, for we of today can only vaguely realize what a ruthless and ever-present scourge small - pox had been to all previous generations of men since history began.

Edward Jenner

EDWARD JENNER.
From the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Despite all efforts to check it by medication and by direct inoculation, it swept now and then over the earth as an all -devastating pestilence, and year by year it claimed one-tenth of all the beings in Christendom by death as its average quota of victims. " From small-pox and love but few remain free," ran the old saw. A pitted face was almost as much a matter of course a hundred years ago as a smooth one is to-day.

Little wonder, then, that the world gave eager acceptance to Jenner's discovery. The first vaccination was made in 1796.

Before the close of the century the method was practised everywhere in Christendom. No urging was needed to induce the majority to give it trial; passengers on a burning ship do not hold aloof from the life-boats. Rich and poor, high and low, sought succor in vaccination, and blessed the name of their deliverer. Of all the great names that were before the world in the closing days of the century, there was perhaps no other one at once so widely known and so uniformly reverenced as that of the English physician Edward Jenner. Surely there was no other one that should be recalled with greater gratitude by posterity.

All advances in science have a bearing, near or remote, on the welfare of our race; but it remains to credit to the closing decade of the eighteenth century a discovery which, in its power of direct and immediate benefit to humanity, surpasses any other discovery of this or any previous epoch.

Needless to say I refer to Jenner's discovery of the method of preventing small-pox by inoculation with the virus of cow-pox. It detracts nothing from the merit of this discovery to say that the preventive power of accidental inoculation had long been rumored among the peasantry of England.

Such vague, unavailing half-knowledge is often the forerunner of fruitful discovery. To all intents and purposes Jenner's discovery was original and unique. Neither, considered as a perfected method, was it in any sense an accident. It was a triumph of experimental science; how great a triumph it is difficult now to understand, for we of today can only vaguely realize what a ruthless and ever-present scourge small - pox had been to all previous generations of men since history began.

Edward Jenner

Edward Jenner
From the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Despite all efforts to check it by medication and by direct inoculation, it swept now and then over the earth as an all -devastating pestilence, and year by year it claimed one-tenth of all the beings in Christendom by death as its average quota of victims. " From small-pox and love but few remain free," ran the old saw. A pitted face was almost as much a matter of course a hundred years ago as a smooth one is to-day.

Little wonder, then, that the world gave eager acceptance to Jenner's discovery. The first vaccination was made in 1796.

Before the close of the century the method was practiced everywhere in Christendom. No urging was needed to induce the majority to give it trial; passengers on a burning ship do not hold aloof from the life-boats. Rich and poor, high and low, sought succor in vaccination, and blessed the name of their deliverer. Of all the great names that were before the world in the closing days of the century, there was perhaps no other one at once so widely known and so uniformly reverenced as that of the English physician Edward Jenner. Surely there was no other one that should be recalled with greater gratitude by posterity.

 

Bibliography

Great Men and Famous Women: A Series of Pen and Pencil Sketches of the Lives of More Than 200 of the Most Prominent Personages in History, Vol. VI, Edited by Charles F. Horne, Copyright 1894, by Selmar Hess. Published by Selmar Hess, Publisher, New York, Pages 263-267.

 

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