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Portrait of Vaccination

General knowledge · Inventions & discoveries

Vaccination

1796

Discovery — medicine and public health

In May 1796 Edward Jenner, a country doctor in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, took matter from a cowpox sore on the hand of the milkmaid Sarah Nelmes and scratched it into the arm of eight-year-old James Phipps. Two months later he exposed the boy to smallpox; nothing happened. The practice was safer than the older technique of variolation, which used smallpox itself, and it took its name from vacca, the Latin for cow. It led to the only deliberate eradication of a human disease: smallpox was declared gone in 1980.

How to spot them

  • ▸Berkeley in Gloucestershire, 1796; a milkmaid called Sarah Nelmes and a boy called James Phipps
  • ▸A cow named Blossom, whose hide is kept at St George's, University of London
  • ▸Named from the Latin for cow; Pasteur extended the word to all such preparations in Jenner's honour
  • ▸The predecessor was variolation, brought to Britain from Constantinople by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Key facts

Matter from a cowpox sore on the hand of the milkmaid Sarah Nelmes (1796)

Scratched into the arm of eight-year-old James Phipps in May 1796; challenged with smallpox that July

'An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae' (1798)

Jenner's self-published account of 23 cases, after the Royal Society declined the paper

Benjamin Jesty, a Dorset farmer who did much the same thing in 1774 (1774)

He treated his wife and sons during an outbreak, but did not publish; Jenner's contribution was the evidence and the argument

Gillray's 1802 cartoon of patients sprouting cattle from their bodies (1802)

'The Cow-Pock', satirising the fear that the treatment would make people bovine

The name comes from vacca, the Latin for cow

Pasteur broadened the term to all such preparations in 1881, explicitly in Jenner's honour

Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital cook in Somalia, October 1977 (1977)

The last naturally occurring case of smallpox anywhere in the world

The World Health Assembly declared the job finished in May 1980 (1980)

Smallpox remains the only human disease deliberately eradicated

Key ideas

  • The immune system remembers: a harmless or weakened version of a pathogen trains it to recognise the real thing, so the response second time is fast enough to prevent disease
  • Cowpox works against smallpox because the two viruses are close relatives and share antigens — cross-immunity, discovered long before anyone knew what a virus was
  • Herd immunity means enough of a population is protected that transmission dies out, which is why eradication is possible at all without vaccinating everybody

Quick-fire facts

  • •Edward Jenner (1749–1823) practised at Berkeley, Gloucestershire, and was also an accomplished naturalist who studied the cuckoo
  • •Variolation, using material from a mild case of smallpox itself, was practised in Asia and Africa for centuries; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu introduced it to Britain after seeing it in Constantinople, having her own daughter treated in 1721
  • •The hide of Blossom, the cow that infected Sarah Nelmes, hangs at St George's, University of London
  • •Jenner was granted £10,000 by Parliament in 1802 and a further £20,000 in 1807
  • •The Vaccination Act of 1853 made it compulsory for infants in England and Wales and provoked an organised anti-vaccination movement
  • •The modern smallpox vaccine uses vaccinia virus, which is neither cowpox nor smallpox and whose origin is still uncertain
  • •Louis Pasteur produced vaccines against chicken cholera, anthrax and rabies; his rabies treatment was first used on Joseph Meister in 1885
  • •The last smallpox death was Janet Parker, a medical photographer infected in a laboratory accident in Birmingham in 1978
  • •Rinderpest, a cattle disease, was declared eradicated in 2011 — the second disease after smallpox
  • •Official samples of the smallpox virus survive in only two places, at the CDC in Atlanta and at VECTOR in Koltsovo, Russia

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Sources