Edward Jenner

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Edward Jenner

“Now James, I need you to try to stay completely still. It may hurt your arm a bit when I make the cuts. It won’t take too terribly long, and if you pay close attention it will be done before you know it. Nurse, please hold his arm out towards me. Please be sure that he doesn’t move his arm, I don’t want there to be any accidents.”

“Those were the last words I heard until the first tests were over. I was in the office of one of the most amazing men I have ever known. His name is Edward Jenner; and I was one of his test subjects in finding a cure for smallpox. Smallpox is a disease that most people who contract it call one of the most painful and frightening experiences of their lives.”

“My name is James Philliphs, the first person given the smallpox vaccine; and the one who helped Edward Jenner prove that it actually works. At the first appointment I stepped into Jenner’s office, he told me about the test procedure, and the called for an assistant to help him run the test. He then asked me to sit down a chair and relax, then asked me to stay patient and stay still as he made two small cuts in my arm. Well, he made the cuts; and they didn’t hurt at all. Now Jenner told me he would be introducing a lesser-known disease called “cowpox” to the cuts. Cowpox was believed by some to be the only safe way to effectively develop immunities to smallpox. Jenner himself said that when someone had overcome cowpox; they had also become immune to smallpox.”

“A little less than fifty or so days after the first day of testing, was called back to Edward Jenner’s office for my second appointment. We followed basically the same procedure as the first time. Although this time he introduced the cuts to smallpox. The strangest thing happened, we waited and waited. But like Jenner predicted, it had no effect on me at all.”

Everyone who heard the news of Jenner’s discovery was amazed. He had successfully come up with the first safe cure for naturally occurring smallpox. Before Jenner’s acclaimed “Vaccination”, the only way to become immune to smallpox was to get infected by it, and then hopefully survive it. A woman named Mary Wortley introduced this method in 1718, 78 years before Jenner’s solution.

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