Edward Jenner & Smallpox

A worldwide vaccination campaign against smallpox was launched, in 1967, by the UN World Health Organization (WHO). Twelve years later, after two years of no reported cases, the WHO felt confident that the disease had at last been eradicated from the planet. It recommended that countries stop vaccinating against the disease and that laboratory stocks of the virus be destroyed. So ended the main battle with the disease that had began in the sixteenth century.

In 1721 a method of vaccination was brought to England, by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the British Ambassador to Turkey. It was well known in eastern countries, and consisted of scratching the vein of a healthy person and pressing a small amount of matter, taken from a smallpox pustule of a person with a mild attack, into the wound. The danger of the treatment was that the patient often contracted the full disease, with fatal results.

An epidemic of smallpox swept through the English county of Gloucestershire in 1788. One of the doctors involved with the outbreak was a thirty nine year old practitioner called Edward Jenner. In the course of his inoculations over many years Jenner had noticed that people who had previously been infected with cowpox, a disease infecting the teats of cows and later the hands of the milkers, were unaffected by the smallpox inoculation. Unlike his other patients, they did not even produce the symptoms of a mild attack of smallpox. He had also noted that when whole families succumbed to small pox, cowpox victims had been unaffected and remained healthy. Jenner was the first to coin the word ‘virus’.

In 1796 Jenner carried out an experiment on one of his patients called James Phipps, an eight year old boy. He made two cuts in the boy’s arm and worked into them a small amount of cowpox puss. Although the boy had the normal reaction, of a slight fever, after several days, he soon recovered. When, a few weeks later Jenner repeated the inoculation, using smallpox matter, the boy remained healthy. Vaccination treatment had been born, named after the medical name for cowpox, vaccinia.

Continuing with his experiments, Jenner reported his results to the Royal Society. They considered, however, that he should not risk his reputation by presenting something "so at variance with established knowledge". In 1798 Jenner published his work privately and within a few years the practice of vaccination for smallpox became widespread.