The First Vaccination: Edward Jenner, 1796
1796 · event
On 14 May 1796 a country doctor in Gloucestershire made two small scratches in the arm of an eight year old boy and rubbed into them material taken from a sore on the hand of a dairymaid. The maid, Sarah Nelmes, had cowpox, a mild illness caught from cattle. The boy, James Phipps, developed a slight fever and recovered. Some weeks later Edward Jenner exposed him to smallpox and no disease followed. The word vaccination comes from the Latin for cow, and it begins here.
Smallpox was one of the great killers of the age. It scarred and blinded survivors and killed a large share of those it infected, above all children. Deliberate infection with a small dose of smallpox itself, known as variolation, had been practised in Asia and Africa for centuries and was brought to England early in the eighteenth century, but it carried a real risk of a fatal case and of spreading the disease.
Jenner was not the first to notice that milkmaids who had caught cowpox seemed to be protected, a piece of country knowledge that others had acted on before him. What he did was test it carefully, repeat it, and publish. His account appeared in 1798 and was translated across Europe within a few years, and governments began organising public vaccination.
The method was refined for two centuries and eventually turned on the disease itself. A worldwide campaign led by the World Health Organization tracked and vaccinated around every remaining case, and in 1980 smallpox was declared eradicated, the only human disease ever removed from the world. The experiment on a child would not be permitted today, and the debt owed to Phipps and Nelmes is now usually stated alongside Jenner's name.