Edward Jenner - discovery

Finally, nearly 30 years after first hearing about cowpox, Jenna decided to experiment. Now all he needed was a milkmaid and in May 1796 she walked through his surgery door. This is possibly the most famous medical image of all time. It shows the hand of Sarah Nelms infected the pustules of cowpox. Jenna took an implement like this, possibly this very one, and with it removed the liquid from the sores and infected a young boy. His name was James Phipps. Eight-year-old Phipps went on to develop cowpox as Jenna hoped. When the illness had passed, Jenna again infected him, this time with smallpox. Two weeks later, Jenna felt able to write to a friend. I have at length accomplished what I have been so long waiting for, the passing of the vaccine virus from one human being to another. Now, listen to the most delightful part of my story. The boy has since been inoculated for the smallpox, which, as I venture to predict, produced no effect. Was Jenna really brilliant or did he just stumble upon something by accident? Well, I think he was both of those things. He did stumble across the discovery. Other people have already done that, so he was not the first to make the connection between cowpox and protection against smallpox. But the crucial thing that he did was to broadcast the news to the world, and he did that in a very imaginative way. In fact, the first paper he submitted was rejected by the Royal Society, so he then did a thing that I think would not be smiled upon these days. He actually had the paper self-published, and when it came out it sold like hot cakes, and people read it and they clearly thought, wow, this is something new. Flawed but brilliant, Jenna's inquiry showed that vaccination with cowpox actually worked and saved lives. So why wasn't it immediately accepted? Well, I think to understand this we need to think about the world in which Jenna was publishing and working. Jenna is, after all, essentially a country doctor, and then, as now, it's the London doctors, it's the metropolitan doctors who see themselves as being in charge of medicine. So what we see here is a constant battle, a kind of natural selection process between lots of different individual practitioners, trying to rubbish the discoveries, the methods, the techniques of other practitioners, and support their own. And it's into this debate that Jenna's work steps. So what was the reaction to the publication of Jenna's results? Well, within this battle there are really sort of three forces. There are people who oppose both Jenna as an individual, as a character, and his method of vaccination. There are then those who like vaccination as a method, but don't like Jenna as an individual. And finally, there are those, very often friends of Jenna, who like both him and his method. So very early on, the battle lines are drawn.