ENGLISH ARTICLES

Edward Jenner (1749-1823)

English physician, the first to establish vaccination on a scientific basis with his studies on smallpox. He was born May 17, 1749, in the vicarage of Berkeley, a small town in Gloucestershire, England. At the age of eight, after weeks of purging, bleeding, and semistarvation he was inoculated with smallpox, and according to the practice of the time, shut up with other children in a stable until the disease had run its natural course.

At twelve, already something of a naturalist, competent in Latin, and with a smattering of Greek, he was appren¬ticed to Mr. Ludlow, a surgeon of Sodbury. Here he first came across the belief, then current among farmers, that the disease cowpox, which affected the udders of cows, when it was communicated to the milkers prevented their catch¬ing smallpox. After serving his apprenticeship, he went to London in 1770 as a pupil in the house of John Hunter. Here, Jenner was instilled with Hunter’s enthusiasm for scientific investigation. Jenner studied anatomy at William Hunter’s anatomy school in Windmill St. and walked the wards of St. George’s Hospital. At the request of Sir Joseph Banks, he arranged the geological and zoological specimens brought back by Captain James Cook on the Endeavor from his voyage of discovery in Australasia. Refusing offers to stay in London, he returned to Berkeley in 1773, where he rapidly gained a high reputation both as a surgeon and a naturalist. In 1778, he contributed to the Royal So¬ciety a paper on the cuckoo. In this paper, he pointed out that it was not the foster parent, generally a hedge-sparrow or tit-lark, but the newly hatched cuckoo who threw the original occupants out of the borrowed nest. In recognition of this discovery, he was made a Fellow of the Royal So¬ciety in the following year.

In 1788, he married Katharine Kingscote and bought The Chantry, a pleasant house in Berkeley. Because of his wife’s delicate health, he spent the summer months at Cheltenham Spa, where, after receiving his M.D. (the university qualifi¬cation for a physician) from St. Andrew’s University in 1792, he succeeded in building up a considerable medical practice.

For many years he had made a study of cowpox, and on May 14, 1796, he inoculated a boy named James Phipps with material taken from a cowpox pustule on the hand of the dairymaid Sarah Nelmes. The boy developed typical cowpox. Six weeks later, he was inoculated with smallpox, and it failed to have any effect. Other experiments followed, and Jenner published the results in “An Inquiry into the Cause of the Variolae Vaccinae, a Disease Discovered in Some of the Western Counties of England, Particularly Gloucestershire, and Known by the Name of the Cowpox.”

As a result of his growing fame, he was received by King George III, Queen Charlotte, the Prince of Wales, and by the Duke of York who made vaccination compulsory in the army, and the Duke of Clarence (later King William IV) who made it compulsory in the navy. Parliament granted Jenner 10,000 in 1801, and 20,000 in 1807. Medals and addresses followed, including “a belt and string of wam¬pum” from the Five Nations of the Iroquois.
Meanwhile, the practice of vaccination spread around the world. It was introduced into North America by Dr. John Coakley Lettsom, the Quaker philanthropist. Presidents Adams and Jefferson helped to popularize it, the latter inoculating his own family and some two hundred others.

Among Jenner’s lesser-known discoveries was his conclu¬sion from postmortem examinations that angina pectoris was due to a disease of the coronary arteries supplying the heart muscle with blood.

Although he was not the first to inoculate with cowpox, he was the first to publish his results and to establish the practice of vaccination on a scientific basis. His work in¬spired Pasteur and ultimately led to the science of immu¬nization and the preventive vaccines of the present day. After the death of his wife in 1816, Jenner settled permanently at his house, The Chantry, where his medical practice and various lines of research continued to occupy him until his death on Jan. 26, 1823. His paper on the migration of birds, in which he remarks that it is the robin and not the lark that heralds the dawn, was published post-humously.