Comprehensive information and links about Edward Jenner

Edward Jenner FRS (May 17, 1749 - January 26, 1823) was an English country doctor who studied nature and his natural surroundings from childhood and practiced medicine in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, England. He is famous for his discovery of the smallpox vaccine.

William Osler records that Jenner was the student to whom William Harvey gave the advice, very famous in medical circles, "Don't think, try". This suggests that Jenner was early noticed by men famous for advancing the practice and institutions of medicine.

Prior to Jenner's discovery, smallpox was greatly feared, as one in three of those who contracted the disease died, and those who survived were badly disfigured. Voltaire, a few years later, recorded that 60% of people caught smallpox, with 20% of the population dying of it.

In fact he thought the initial source of infection was a disease of horses, called "the grease", and that this was transferred to cows by farmworkers, transformed, and then manifested as cowpox. From that point on he was correct, the complication probably arose from coincidence.

Noting the common observation that milkmaids did not generally get smallpox, Jenner theorized that the pus in the blisters which milkmaids received from cowpox (a disease similar to smallpox, but much less virulent) protected the milkmaids from smallpox. He may have had the advantage of hearing stories of Benjamin Jesty and perhaps others deliberately arranging Cowpox infection of their families and of a reduced risk in those families.

In 1796, Jenner tested his theory by innoculating James Phipps, a young boy, with material from the cowpox blisters of the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a milkmaid who had caught cowpox from a cow called Blossom. Phipps was the 17th case described in Jenners first paper on vaccination.

Jenner innoculated Phipps with cowpox pus in both arms on one day. This produced a fever and some uneasiness but no great illness. Later, he injected Phipps with variolous material, which would have been the routine attempt to produce immunity at that time. No disease followed. Jenner reports that later the boy was again challenged with variolacious material and again showed no sign of infection.

He continued his research and reported it to the Royal Society. After improvement and further work this became a report of 23 cases. Some of his conclusions were correct, and some erroneous - modern microbiological and microscopic methods would make this easier to repeat. The medical establishment, then as now, considered his findings for some time before accepting them. Eventually his discovery was accepted and became so successful that in 1840 the British government banned variolation and provided vaccination free of charge. (See Vaccination acts)

Jenner did not patent his vaccine.

In 1980, the World Health Organisation declared smallpox an extinct disease.

A small museum housing the horns of the cow Blossom now exists in his home town. The word vaccination comes from the Latin ion of the newly-hatched cuckoo pushing its host's eggs and fledglings from the nest (contrary to the existing belief that the adult cuckoo did it) was only confirmed in the 20th century [1]. His paper on the Cuckoo secured his election to Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1749.