The term "vaccination" comes from variolae vaccinae, an old medical term for smallpox of the cow, or cowpox. It was coined by Edward Jenner in his paper Inquiry Into the Variolae Vaccinae Known as the Cow Pox. On this day in 1796, Jenner committed what would today be regarded as a crime against humanity -- he injected pus from a cowpox blister into James Phipps, the eight year old son of Jenner's gardener. Phipps caught a fever and some uneasiness but no full blown infection. Later, he injected the boy with smallpox pus. He showed no signs of infection. Jenner went on to test his technique on 23 other people.
Contrary to myth, Jenner did not invent vaccination. He was just the first person to study it scientifically, and is therefore regarded as the founder of immunology. Jenner himself had been variolated, an early form of vaccination that had been imported into Britain by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in 1721. The idea was to insert or rub the skin with actual smallpox material, pus or ground up scabs. Smallpox normally passes through the air and into the lungs so infection of the skin usually produced a milder, localized version of the disease.
Lady Montagu had observed the technique on a trip to Constantinople. Voltaire states that the Circassians had used the technique since time immemorial, and the Turks may have imported it from them. In 1766, the great Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernoulli analyzed smallpox morbidity and mortality data to demonstrate the efficacy of inoculation.
By 1768, English physician John Fewster had realized that prior infection with cowpox rendered a person immune to smallpox. In the years following 1770, at least five investigators in England and Germany successfully tested in humans a cowpox vaccine against smallpox. One of them, Dorset farmer Benjamin Jesty successfully vaccinated and presumably induced immunity with cowpox in his wife and two children during a smallpox epidemic in 1774, but it was not until Jenner's work that the procedure became widely understood. Jenner may have been aware of Jesty's procedures and success. A similar observation was later made in France by Jacques Antoine Rabaut-Pommier in 1780.
Shetland Renaissance man John Williamson (known as Johnnie Notions since he was a singular instance of an uncommon variety of talents, being a tailor, a joiner, a clock and watch-mender, a blacksmith, a sheep farmer, a fisherman, and a physician), at the same time as Jenner, devised a method to weaken the smallpox virus when an epidemic imported from mainland Britain wiped out 1/3 of Shetland residents. Notions took smallpox pus and dried it using peat smoke. He then buried it in the ground with camphor for up to 7 or 8 years before being administered to patients. His technique, however, was confined to the Shetland Islands.
The textbooks say Jenner noticed that cow maids never got smallpox after contracting cowpox and postulated that pus in the blisters protected them. That is clearly not true. Jenner built on a long history of preceding work. His unique contribution was not the idea of vaccination itself, but the fact that he then systematically and scientifically investigated it, demonstrating by subsequent challenges that they were immune to smallpox. He turned anecdote into data.
Jenner continued his research and reported it to the Royal Society, which did not publish the initial paper. After revisions and further investigations, he published his findings on the 23 cases, including his 11-month-old son Robert. The medical establishment deliberated at length over his findings before accepting them. In 1840, Parliament passed the first of a series of Vaccination Acts that banned the use of variolation and provided cowpox vaccinations to the public free of charge.
Between 1803 and 1806, inspired by Jenner's work, Spanish physician Francisco Javier de Balmis led an expedition to the Americas, the Phillipines and Macao with the aim of vaccinating as many people as possible. Jenner wrote of this voyage "I don’t imagine the annals of history furnish an example of philanthropy so noble, so extensive as this."
Europe was in the middle of the Napolenoic wars at the time. Nevertheless, hearing of Jenner's work, Napoleon had his entire army vaccinated, awarded Jenner a medal, and at Jenner's request released two prisoners of war and allowed them to return home.
Voltaire wrote at the time that 60% of the population caught smallpox and 20% of the population died from it, making it one of the most lethal diseases ever known. In 1980, the World Health Organization (remember them? the ones who are lying about Covid in a conspiracy to take away our freedom), having led a worldwide vaccination effort that started in 1967, declared smallpox eradicated. The only remaining pus samples are under liquid nitrogen at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR in Russia.
Jenner had a probable stroke on 25 January 1823 followed by another one the next day which killed him.
So get your damn vaccination, people. Today is a good day to do it. While you're in the waiting area, you can read Jenner's Royal Society paper that started it all.
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