Dr. Edward Jenner was training as a doctor with a rural health focus in England in the 1760s.
He had a patient, Sarah Nelmes, who was a dairymaid.
Sarah once went to see Jenner for a strange rash on her hand.
Having seen many of these infections in women who milked cows, Jenner concluded it was an occupational hazard – cowpox.
One day, Jenner overheard Sarah saying that she couldn’t catch smallpoxSmallpox started with a high fever & body aches, then rashes that starting from the mouth traveled to the face and then to other body parts. These rashes became pus sores all over the body. because she had already had cowpox.
Smallpox at that time was devastating – 30% of those who got it died & hundreds of thousands were dying each year.
Hearing that the much milder cowpox could make Sarah immune to smallpox, Jenner decided to put this idea to test.
He extracted pus from Sarah’s cowpox-infected hand and transferred it to the body of an eight-year-old boy James Phipps (son of Jenner’s gardener), by breaking the protective barrier of his skin.
After a few days, he injected James with smallpox (extracted from a patient), but James survived the exposure.
Jenner, who was ridiculed for the exploitation of a child, continued his experiments with other children and his success got him the title, “father of immunology”.
He named his technique vaccination after the Latin word vaccinus (meaning “from the cow”).
He was eventually awarded grants (equivalent to over a million US$ today).
And he used most of these funds to build a hut called Temple of Vaccinia, where he vaccinated those who couldn’t afford to pay for the procedure.
