26 April 2009
Vaccine Milestones: Edward Jenner
By Elizabeth Fee, Ph.D.
Fee is the chief of the History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. She prepared these articles exclusively for eJournal USA.
Different cultures around the world have made efforts to protect people from infectious diseases for hundreds of years with varying degrees of success. Records show that the Chinese practiced inoculation against smallpox as early as 1000 B.C. The process was to take a scab from a smallpox lesion, store it for a month, mix it with plant material, and then place the concoction in the nose of a patient. The majority of patients thus treated developed a milder form of the disease, and if and when they recovered, they were protected from future infection with smallpox. Similar practices were reported from India and North Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries. Some accounts credit Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the British ambassador in Constantinople, with bringing this practice from Turkey to Great Britain in the early 18th century. The procedure was risky because those inoculated might contract smallpox, which could prove fatal.
Country folk in England had long known that milkmaids were likely to be spared the ravages of smallpox, and their resistance was somehow related to the mild pox infection they tended to acquire from the cows. Some physicians observed the same phenomena, but Edward Jenner carried out experiments to test the relationship between cowpox and smallpox in 1796. He published his results and is generally credited with being the discoverer of vaccination.
Jenner experimented by taking some pus from a lesion on the hand of a milkmaid and inoculating it into the hand of a young boy. Some weeks later, Jenner inoculated the boy with infectious material containing smallpox. Of course, such human experimentation would never be permitted today, but Jenner, and the boy, were fortunate. The experiment was a success, the boy did not become ill, and Jenner concluded that inoculation of infectious material from a mild strain of a disease could protect a person from a far more serious disease.
This then is the principle of vaccination, although the scientific basis for it would not be understood for many decades.
From the March 2007 eJournal USA, “Lifesaving Vaccines”
