Benjamin Jesty

Benjamin Jesty vaccinated his wife and two sons with cowpox in 1774, twenty-two years before Edward Jenner did the same thing and published it. He was a tenant farmer at Yetminster in Dorset, and like everyone in dairy country he knew that milkmaids who had caught cowpox did not take smallpox; two of his own servants had nursed smallpox cases without effect. During an epidemic he walked his family to a farm at Chetnole where a cow was infected, and scratched matter from its udder into their arms with a stocking needle. His wife Elizabeth's arm became badly inflamed and a doctor had to be called, and the village reaction was hostile enough that he was abused in the street and at church - the objection being partly that introducing animal matter into a human being was unnatural, which is the same argument that met Jenner. The boys were tested with smallpox inoculation years later and did not take it. He never wrote it up. The difference between him and Jenner is not the idea and not the courage but the publication and the deliberate challenge afterwards, which is what turned a piece of country practice into a procedure other physicians could repeat. The Original Vaccine Pock Institute brought him to London in 1805, had his portrait painted and acknowledged his priority. His gravestone at Worth Matravers records that he was the first person known to have introduced the cow pox by inoculation, and that he did it on his wife and children in 1774. The Wellcome Collection holds the 1805 portrait painted at the institute s expense. Jenner knew of country practice of this kind and said so. Jesty s sons lived into the 1840s and were shown to the medical press as evidence.

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