James Phipps

James Phipps was the eight-year-old son of Edward Jenner's gardener, and the first person deliberately vaccinated against smallpox. Jenner had noticed what Gloucestershire dairy farmers already said, that milkmaids who caught cowpox did not get smallpox, and in May 1796 he took material from a cowpox lesion on the hand of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes and scratched it into the boy's arm. Phipps had a mild fever and was well within days. Six weeks later Jenner inoculated him with genuine smallpox matter, by the variolation method then in use, and nothing happened; he repeated the challenge about twenty times over the following years with the same result. That second step is the experiment, and it would not be permitted now on a child who could not consent and whose father was employed by the experimenter. The Royal Society refused the paper, so Jenner published it himself in 1798 and coined vaccination from vacca, the Latin for cow. The practice spread across Europe within five years and smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980, the only human disease so far eliminated. Jenner gave Phipps a cottage rent-free for life and planted the roses in its garden himself; the house stands in Berkeley and is part of the Jenner museum. Phipps married, had children, and died of tuberculosis at about sixty-five. He and Joseph Meister, Pasteur's first rabies patient, are the two children on whom the two founding vaccines were first tried. Jenner attended his funeral. Variolation, the older practice of inoculating with live smallpox, killed roughly one patient in fifty and was banned in Britain in 1840 once vaccination was established.

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