Edward Jenner
Edward Jenner
Edward Jenner (1749–1823) was an English country physician who developed the smallpox vaccine and is often called “the father of immunology.” Trained under the surgeon John Hunter in London, he returned to practice medicine in his home town of Berkeley, Gloucestershire, where he also earned election to the Royal Society for his study of the cuckoo. Rural tradition held that milkmaids who had caught the mild disease cowpox were protected from smallpox, then one of the most feared diseases in the world. His turning point came in May 1796, when he inoculated a boy, James Phipps, with material from a cowpox sore and later showed that the boy was protected against smallpox. He published his findings in 1798, and the word “vaccine” comes from the Latin for cow. He shared his method widely and vaccinated the poor free of charge. Smallpox was declared eradicated worldwide in 1980.
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Pioneers of Vaccines and Antibiotics
Edward Jenner introduced vaccination against smallpox in 1796, using material from cowpox. Louis Pasteur developed vaccines against anthrax and rabies and proposed extending the word vaccine to all such protections in Jenner's honor. Paul Ehrlich, seeking a 'magic bullet' against disease, developed Salvarsan (1910), often called the first modern chemotherapeutic drug. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, and Jonas Salk's polio vaccine, announced in 1955, was never patented.
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