Sarah Nelmes

Sarah Nelmes was the dairymaid whose cowpox Edward Jenner used for the first vaccination, and she is one of the few people in the story of the disease whose part is fixed by a date and a name. She worked at a farm near Berkeley in Gloucestershire, and in May 1796 she was milking a cow called Blossom when she caught cowpox through a scratch on her hand from a thorn. Jenner drew the lesion, and the drawing was published in his Inquiry two years later. On 14 May he took matter from it and inoculated James Phipps, the eight-year-old son of his gardener, and six weeks later challenged the boy with live smallpox to no effect. The observation underneath all of this was not Jenner's: Gloucestershire dairy country had held for generations that milkmaids did not get smallpox, a farmer named Benjamin Jesty had inoculated his own family with cowpox in 1774, and others had done the same. What Jenner added was the deliberate challenge afterwards and the publication. Blossom's hide hangs in the library of St George's medical school in London. Nelmes herself disappears from the record almost entirely after 1796; her dates are uncertain and her later life is unknown. She was neither a patient nor an experimenter but the source of the material, which is a category the history of medicine has generally not kept names for. Jenner named the cow Blossom in the Inquiry, and the pox on the hand is reproduced as a coloured plate. Benjamin Jesty s gravestone in Dorset records his priority explicitly. Smallpox killed an estimated three hundred million people in the twentieth century alone before eradication in 1980.

• Lived: 1770 CE – 1810 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: other