‘Vaccine’s history begins in 1796 with Edward Jenner, a country doctor in Gloucestershire. Smallpox was a leading cause of death at the time, with a mortality rate of about 20% to 30%. Survivors were often left with severe scarring and sometimes blindness too. Jenner noticed a pattern among the local milkmaids. Lots of them caught cowpox, a mild disease that caused sores similar to smallpox but was far less dangerous. But they rarely caught the much deadlier smallpox. He decided to investigate why.
On 14 May 1796, Jenner took material from a cowpox sore on the hand of a local milkmaid (called Sarah Nelmes). He then made small incisions on the arm of an eight-year-old boy called James Phipps (whose parents must have been very trusting), and inserted the cowpox stuff. The boy developed a mild fever but recovered quickly.
A few weeks later, Jenner exposed James to smallpox to see if the cowpox had protected him (seriously, that poor child). Thankfully for everyone concerned, he didn’t develop smallpox, proving the theory that cowpox had made the boy immune to it.
Jenner performing his first vaccination on poor old James Phipps
The concept of deliberately introducing a bit of a disease (not the technical term) to bring about immunity wasn’t new. Called ‘variolation’, people had been doing it with smallpox for centuries (it was used in China as early as the 10th century). But it didn’t always work, and sometimes led to severe cases of the disease. Jenner’s innovation was much safer because it used cowpox, which was less dangerous than smallpox. That’s why it got a new name – ‘vaccine’ – which comes from the Latin word ‘vacca’, meaning ‘cow’ (we got there eventually).
Jenner’s method spread across Europe and eventually the world, laying the groundwork for modern immunology and the development of vaccines for many other diseases, including covid. In 1802, he got a grant from the British government to continue his research, which would eventually lead to the global eradication of smallpox by the World Health Organization in 1980. Well done, Edward.
If you’re wondering what happened to James, he died of smallpox a few years later. KIDDING. There’s not actually much known about his later life, although he did get a free house from Jenner. Which seems like the least he could do, frankly. Phipps died in 1853, making him 65. And in a nice twist, that cottage went on to house the Edward Jenner Museum between 1968 and 1982.
(I don’t want to be Debbie Downer, but in the interests of balance I should probably point out that Phipps wasn’t the first child to be experimented on, I mean, vaccinated against smallpox with cowpox. In 1791, a man called Peter Plett picked a pickled pepper, sorry, inoculated three children in Germany, and in 1774 a guy called Benjamin Jesty also did it on three of his family members (!). But Jenner was the first person to publish details of the vaccination, which is why he gets the credit.)