Edward Jenner Case Study

The smallpox virus plagued humans for thousands of years, resulting in millions of deaths worldwide, before Edward Jenner stumbled upon a way to eventually eradicate the disease. The disease devastated populations across Asia, Africa, Europe, and eventually the Americas through the voyages of discovery. The number of Aztecs and Native Americans killed by the virus is far greater than the number killed in battles with white settlers. The virus had a fatality rate of approximately 30% while survivors were often left with permanent scarring, deformities, and blindness as a result of the disease. Before Jenner's vaccine, practitioners in Asia developed a method known as variolation that was eventually brought to England in 1721 by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu after spending time abroad in Turley. This became the

Case I concerns Joseph Merret, a former servant that assisted with milking cows who contracted cowpox in 1770. Merret was inoculated with his family twenty-five years after suffering from the disease whilst several of his family members suffered from smallpox, but he himself did not develop any symptoms of the disease. Jenner takes the time to explain that due to the fact that the population was thin where Merret lived that he was able to ensure that no one whose case is recorded had previously suffered from smallpox. Case II speaks of Sarah Portlock, who’d been infected twenty-seven years prior to nursing her smallpox-infected child. Variolous matter was inserted both of her arms, but she remained uninfected. Case V is of Mrs. H—, who contracted cowpox from handling utensils also used by the servants of the family. She was later exposed to smallpox while caring for an ill relative who fell to the disease, yet she never developed symptoms of the disease. She was inoculated with active variolous matter and still remained