Edward Jenner
1749 – 1823 · United Kingdom
Known for: Creator of the smallpox vaccine, the world's first vaccine, and founder of immunology
“A country physician who taught the world how to prevent disease rather than merely endure it.”
Biography
Edward Jenner was born on 17 May 1749 at Berkeley in Gloucestershire, the eighth of nine children of the parish vicar, Stephen Jenner. He was schooled at Wotton-under-Edge and Cirencester, and while still a boy was variolated against smallpox, a crude and dangerous procedure that left a lasting mark on his health. At thirteen he was apprenticed for seven years to Daniel Ludlow, a surgeon at Chipping Sodbury, and in 1770 he went on to St George's Hospital in London to study surgery and anatomy under John Hunter, who became a lifelong correspondent and later proposed him for the Royal Society. By 1773 he had returned to his native countryside as a family doctor and surgeon at Berkeley, taking his MD from the University of St Andrews in 1792 after two decades in practice.
Country practice gave Jenner the observation on which his fame rests: those who had caught cowpox from cattle appeared to be spared smallpox, a disease then killing roughly a tenth of the population and more in crowded towns. In 1796 he inoculated a local boy with matter from a cowpox sore and afterwards exposed him to smallpox without effect, and in 1798 he published his Inquiry describing the protective power of what he called Variolae vaccinae, the cow pox, giving the words vaccine and vaccination to medicine. He tested the method on his own infant son and sent samples of lymph freely to practitioners at home and abroad. His curiosity extended beyond medicine: a careful study of the cuckoo, showing that the newly hatched bird itself ejects its host's eggs by means of a hollow in its back, brought him fellowship of the Royal Society in 1788.
His wife Catherine died of tuberculosis in 1815, and Jenner withdrew increasingly to Berkeley, where he served as mayor and justice of the peace and, in 1821, was appointed physician to George IV. He died there on 26 January 1823. Vaccination spread across continents within his own lifetime, and in 1980 smallpox became the first human disease declared eradicated, the distant result of a country doctor's inquiry.