Edward Jenner
Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine and gave vaccination its name. Born in Berkeley in Gloucestershire in 1749, the son of a vicar, he was orphaned at five and apprenticed to a country surgeon at thirteen, then trained in London under John Hunter, who told him not to think but to try — the experimental principle he worked by. He returned to practise as a country doctor, and was also a serious naturalist: he studied the cuckoo, establishing that the newly hatched chick ejects its foster siblings, which was disbelieved until photography confirmed it, and he was elected to the Royal Society for it. Smallpox killed perhaps four hundred thousand Europeans a year and blinded and disfigured many more. Inoculation with live smallpox — variolation — was practised, and it killed one or two in a hundred and could start outbreaks. It was known among dairy workers that people who had caught cowpox did not get smallpox. Jenner's contribution was to test it and to prove it transmissible from person to person. On 14 May 1796 he took material from a cowpox pustule on the hand of a milkmaid, Sarah Nelmes, and scratched it into the arm of James Phipps, the eight-year-old son of his gardener. The boy had a mild fever. In July Jenner inoculated him with smallpox matter, and nothing happened; he repeated the challenge some twenty times. The Royal Society rejected the paper, so he published it himself in 1798, calling the agent vaccine from the Latin for cow. Smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980. He died in 1823.
- Lived: 1749 CE – 1823 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: physician, scientist
