Dr Edward Jenner
Smallpox Vaccine
Andrew Marr’s History of the World - Age of Revolution
Wherever we look, the purest political ideals of the Enlightenment seem to be corrupted, by greed for land and profits or a drive to bloody extremism.
You could conclude that the Age of Reason was so much hypocrisy.
Luckily, there was much more to the Enlightenment than power politics.
In the summer of 1757, in Wotton-under-Edge in Gloucestershire, an eight-year-old boy called Edward Jenner was taken to a place known as a pest house. He faced a horrific medical ordeal.
For four weeks, he was starved and bled with leeches. Then the doctor got to work. He pressed dried smallpox scabs into the wound. This was a dangerous procedure.
Smallpox caused as many as one in seven deaths worldwide. Blisters erupted all over the body, including the mouth and throat, making it impossible to swallow. Huge numbers of people were marked for life.
But the doctor was trying to help Jenner. Since ancient times, all around the world, doctors had known that by infecting patients with a very small amount of smallpox, they could protect them against the full-blown disease, and it mostly worked.
But there was a problem. It MOSTLY worked! In some cases, apart from the fact that this was a very unpleasant process, the patient would get full-blown smallpox and all the scars, and go blind or even die.
So, with the best possible intentions, the doctors were gambling with young Jenner’s life.
And Edward Jenner was one of the lucky ones. He grew up to be an Enlightenment man, a country doctor with an enquiring mind. He was fascinated by all the sciences. In his own way, as ready as Galileo to challenge perceived ideas and travel into the unknown. And it became his obsession to find a cure for smallpox that was reliable and safe.
One day, a local milkmaid told him that because she’d suffered from the harmless disease cowpox, she could no never catch smallpox. Jenner began to wonder whether this local country legend might hold the key.
Young James Phipps
And so Jenner started to travel around, trying to find anyone who’d been infected with cowpox, and sure enough they all confirmed that none of them then got smallpox. And so he was pretty convinced that there was something in cowpox that would defend you against smallpox. But how to test this out?
He had to find somebody, infect them with cowpox, then infect them with smallpox. Interesting stuff! Dangerous stuff.
The opportunity to test his theory came in the summer of 1796, when the local milkmaid came down with cowpox. Jenner took some pus from the blisters on her hand. He then took his gardener’s son, James Phipps… and infected him with cowpox.
James Phipps went down with the mild disease. Jenner allowed him to recover… and then he deliberately infected the boy with smallpox.
Now, these days, there are ferocious arguments about the ethics of using animals for medical experiments. In Jenner’s time, simply snaffling a working-class boy and using him seems to have caused no comment at all. Luckily, young James recovered. He had achieved immunity.
And so, in this house, then, had taken place the world’s first vaccination. Vaccination, from the Latin for cow, “vacca”.
Unlike Galileo, Edward Jenner lived in a society where ideas were free to whirl around. His book explaining vaccination was a huge bestseller. The good news spread everywhere. Napoleon vaccinated his whole army and gave Jenner a medal. In America, President Jefferson vaccinated his household. And Jenner’s discovery was soon saving lives all around the world.
Almost 200 years later, in 1980, the world health organisation announced the complete eradication of smallpox. It’s still the only human disease to have been wiped off the face of the Earth.
During Jenner’s lifetime, politicians were declaring the rights of man. It was a period of extreme political violence, where on the continent, tens of thousands died in the name of liberty. And yet Edward Jenner, a true child of the Enlightenment, using nothing more than his own powers of observation and the freedom to publish and discuss and test ideas, did more for human happiness than all the politicians put together. No humane being who has ever lived has saved more lives in history than the simple country doctor from Gloucestershire.
