Students
If you want to know about Edward Jenner, you might like to start by looking at one of the videos made by children at Berkeley Primary School and Rednock Secondary School.
This is a project that is funded by the Wellcome Trust.
Below is a short introduction to Edward Jenner’s life and work.
There was an old country saying that dairymaids didn’t catch the smallpox if they had already caught the cowpox.
Cowpox is a disease that dairymaids can catch from milking their cows. It gives them blisters on their hands and arms that look like smallpox: see the picture. But cowpox is a much milder disease. People who get cowpox recover quite quickly and are not left with scarred faces. For this reason dairymaids had a reputation for being beautiful and ‘fresh faced’.
Jenner reasoned that, if the country stories were true, giving people the cowpox deliberately might be a way of protecting them from getting smallpox.
The Big Experiment
In the summer of 1796, Edward Jenner performed his most famous experiment. The other characters in this drama were: James Phipps, the eight year old son of the gardener. Sarah Nelmes, the dairymaid who had caught the cowpox.
The first vaccination
First Jenner made a few scratches in James’ arm. Into those scratches he smeared some pus taken from a cowpox blister on the back of Sarah the dairymaid’s hand.
Over the next few days James felt a bit unwell and slightly feverish. He developed a cowpox blister himself but this healed and he was soon completely well again.
A few weeks later came the more risky part of the experiment. Jenner scratched James’ arm again, but this time he smeared pus from a smallpox blister into the scratches.
Would James catch smallpox? No. James didn’t develop smallpox.
So it looked as if Jenner was right: giving people cowpox would protect them from the much more deadly disease of smallpox.
And so the history of vaccination began: with a cow, a dairymaid and an eight year old boy.
Immunity
Of course, doing an experiment once is not enough to be sure you are right. So Jenner and other scientists repeated similar experiments and the results were the same.
Nowadays, we would say that the cowpox made James immune to the smallpox. In the same way a vaccination against measles, makes you immune to catching measles.
Edward Jenner wanted to get rid of smallpox forever. He didn’t manage to do it in his lifetime. But in 1980 the World Health Organization was able to declare the world free of smallpox, after a 20 year international campaign of vaccinations.
Find out more
You can find out more about Edward Jenner and his work by looking at the Edward Jenner section of this website and by visiting the Edward Jenner Museum. The museum is in the very house where Edward Jenner lived and died, and where he carried out his famous experiment on James Phipps.
Blossom, the cow that gave Sarah the cowpox.
© 2009 Edward Jenner Museum
Registered Charity 284085
Berkeley, Gloucestershire, England.
