Edward Jenner - Scientific Research and the Smallpox Vaccine
Smallpox, first seen in Africa around 10,000 BC, had become the fiercest plague on earth and was known and feared by everyone. The mortality rate was staggering. When Cortez and his army came to the Americas in 1520, they brought the disease with them. Three and one-half million Aztecs died within two years. The most common preventative treatment was an injection of the milder form of the smallpox virus. The success rate for smallpox prevention was not good, due, perhaps, to the re-use of contaminated equipment and needles, or mistakenly using the more fierce virus for inoculation.
Edward Jenner was born in 1749 in Berkeley, England. His father, Reverend Stephen Jenner, was the local vicar. The Jenner family was inoculated against smallpox. Edward survived, which is notable because some people contracted smallpox from the inoculation.
At age 13, Edward became an apprentice to Daniel Ludlow, a surgeon in nearby Bristol. He became aware of the folklore that milkmaids who had caught cowpox, a disease affecting cattle, could not catch smallpox. When he was 21, he studied medicine at London's St. Georges Hospital as an apprentice to John Hunter. Hunter taught him about the scientific method of research. The scientific method includes forming a hypothesis, devising an experiment, conducting the experiment, and taking detailed notes which are then used to prove or disprove the hypothesis. Edward was such a good student and researcher that his classification of a species brought back to England by the explorer Cook, captured the attention of the Captain who offered Edward a place on his next expedition. Edward declined.
At age 23, Jenner returned to Berkeley and started his practice as a country doctor. Edward was reminded of the folklore about milkmaids and cowpox. He saw evidence of this phenomenon among this patients. Human experimentation was not uncommon at the time, and on May 14, 1796, Jenner injected a "healthy" patient, an eight year old boy named James Phipps, with the cowpox virus. Later, he deliberately injected the boy with the smallpox virus. The patient did not succumb to smallpox, even after repeated injections. Jenner "treated" a total of thirteen patients using cowpox as a vaccine.
The Latin word for cow, is vacca. Jenner included this base word to coin the word vaccination, which has come to mean infecting the patient with a mild strain of a disease so the body will create antibodies that are effective against more virulent strains of the disease. Jenner wanted to publish his findings, but his techniques were in such conflict with the common practice for
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