The Family Doctor
The General Practitioner
Jenner faced a vast array of medical problems on a daily basis. Patients would often come to consult at The Chantry, Jenner's home, or he would make home visits on horseback, sometimes riding great distances in bad weather.
On one occasion he almost lost his own life when visiting a patient at Kingscote, ten miles from home, during a blizzard. Amazingly, he visited patients over an area of about 400 square miles, from Gloucester in the north to Bristol in the south.
His medical practice did not abandon those too poor to pay for treatment.
Between 1796 and 1804 Reverend Robert Ferryman, built for him a small thatched hut in the corner of the Chantry garden. In this building on certain days the poor of the district would be given vaccinations, free of charge.
The Surgeon
Jenner was also a practising surgeon. Bloodletting, either by cutting veins or by applying leeches, was a common treatment. He would have been proficient at the rapid amputation - without anaesthetics - of limbs that were gangrenous with infection after injury.
Although Jenner's friend Humphry Davy had suggested in 1800 that the gas nitrous oxide could be used to relieve pain, the use of anaesthetics did not enter routine medical practice until the 1840s.
The operation that Jenner performed most frequently was 'cutting for the stone' - the removal of kidney stones. Tracheotomy (the insertion of an artificial windpipe to relieve obstruction in the throat) had been introduced into surgery in 1730. It was a vital in the relief of the effects of diphtheria. Appendicitis could be diagnosed and corrected surgically after 1736.
In routine medicine the value of measuring body temperature was not demonstrated until 1815, although Jenner himself was aware of temperature changes in animals and owned a precious thermometer.
His close friend, the great London surgeon John Hunter, had given this to him. The stethoscope was introduced in 1816, opening the way to a better understanding of the mechanics of the heart and lungs.
© 2009 Edward Jenner Museum
Registered Charity 284085
Berkeley, Gloucestershire, England.
