Edward Jenner and the Discovery of Vaccines

764 Words2 Pages

Edward Jenner and the Discovery of Vaccines

Edward Jenner (1749-1823) trained in London, under John Hunter, and

was an army surgeon for a period of time. After that, he spent his

whole career as a country doctor in his home county, Gloucestershire

(West of England). His research was based on careful case studies and

clinical observation more than a hundred years before scientists could

explain what viruses and diseases actually were. His innovative new

method was successful to such an extent that by 1840 the British

government had banned alternative preventive treatments against

smallpox.

[IMAGE]

His invention of vaccination against smallpox was the medical

breakthrough that saved the most lives, before antibiotics came into

mass use. Before Jenner's vaccine, smallpox was a killer disease; the

majority of its victims were infants and young children. In the

twentieth century alone it killed more than 300 million -

approximately three times the number of deaths from all of that

century's wars and battles combined.

The last reported case of smallpox occurred in Somalia. There, on

October 26, 1977, a youth named Ali Maow Maalin recovered from a rash

caused by smallpox. He was entitled the last case of natural smallpox

in the world. In 1980, thanks to Jenner's discovery, the World Health

Assembly officially declared "the world and its peoples" free from

endemic smallpox.

When Jenner began medical practice at Berkeley (in Gloucestershire) he

was asked a lot, to inoculate persons against smallpox. Inoculation

was not a common practice in the English countryside until around 1768

when Robert Sutton (of Debenham, Suffolk) i...

... middle of paper ...

...any - it was his

gift to the world.

The word vaccination comes from the Latin 'vacca' which means cow - in

honour of the part played by the cow Blossom and Sarah in Jenner's

research. "Vaccination," the word Jenner invented for his treatment,

was adopted by Pasteur for immunization against any disease.

We now know that one way to create a vaccine is to use an organism

which is similar to the virulent organism but that does not cause

serious disease, such as Jenner did with his use of the relatively

mild cowpox virus to protect against the similar, but often lethal,

smallpox virus. A more modern example of this type of vaccine is the

BCG vaccine used to protect against Tuberculosis.

Strangely enough, Jenner invented vaccination before physicians and

scientists had a proper understanding of viruses and disease.

Open Document