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Edward Jenner's Story
After training in London, Edward Jenner spent his career as a country doctor in his home county of Gloucestershire. Nevertheless, he is remembered as one of the great heroes of medical science as a result of his discovery of vaccination against smallpox.
- 1749
- Edward Jenner was born. The young Edward showed an interest in nature and science, spending hours on the banks of the river Severn looking for fossils. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a surgeon, and at twenty one he began his medical training at St George's Hospital in London in 1770. Two years later Edward began to practise as a doctor in his native village of Berkeley.
In the late eighteenth century smallpox was still a very dangerous disease, capable of scarring and even killing its victims. However, Edward Jenner listened to the country lore of local farm folk. They believed that someone who caught a mild infection called cowpox would not catch the much more serious smallpox.
- 1796
- A milk maid called Sarah Nelmes came to Jenner complaining of a cowpox rash on her hand. Jenner decided to transfer some of the material from Sarah's cowpox to James Phipps, the eight year old son of his gardener. James fell ill with cowpox but soon recovered. Jenner then rubbed some material from a smallpox scab into scratches on the boy's arm. As Jenner had predicted, James did not catch smallpox. Something in the cowpox was protecting him. The science of immunology was born. Jenner's discovery came to be known as vaccination from the Latin word for a cow: vacca.
Jenner was interested in all aspects of science. In 1784 he experimented with a hydrogen balloon which travelled over ten miles, terrifying the farm labourers who witnessed it. He collected fossils and studied the habits of birds. He was the first man to realise that it was the newly hatched cuckoo chick, and not its parents, that ejected the eggs and chicks of other birds from its foster-nest.
Edward spent most of his later years writing to scientists around the world who wanted to know about his vaccination experiments. However he continued to work as a local doctor, often operating on the country folk that came to ask for his help.
Edward Jenner spent much of his adult life in a beautiful Georgian house in Berkeley called The Chantry. Jenner's home is now a museum which keeps alive the memory of his ground-breaking medical work.
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