Edward Jenner and the first vaccine

Hey, let's meet Edward Jenner, the English doctor famous for vaccinations. He's known as the father of immunology and we're going to find out why. Edward Jenner was born in a small town in Gloucestershire, England in 1749. That's seven years before the composer Mozart and 20 years before George Washington. He was the son of a Edward was only five when his father died. As a vicar's son, he grew up in a cultured, well-read family with plenty of books and he was lucky. He was sent to school to get a proper education. He wasn't a swot by any means. He was far more interested in geology and the natural world and his room was full of nests and fossils and stuff about animals. Jenner was a country boy at heart who loved to wander the fields and forests looking at flowers and wildlife. His keen eye for nature would be important in his later work. Did you know that many vaccinations we use today include things from animals? At 13, Jenner became an apprentice to the local apothecary, the closest thing to the village doctor back then. An apothecary made medicines and simple treatments out of herbs and plants. He spent seven years learning the trade and then he moved to London to train with the famous surgeon John Hunter at St George's Hospital. Don't forget that back then if you wanted to be a scientist like Isaac Newton 100 years earlier or Charles Darwin 50 years later, you needed to be an educated gentleman with your own income, your own money because you weren't getting paid by anyone. Smallpox was a horrible contagious disease that had killed millions of people since the Egyptian times. Pus-filled sores covered the body leaving horrible scars for the rest of your life and often causing blindness. No one knew what caused it, everyone was afraid of it, no one knew how to prevent it or how to treat it and it killed one in every three people who caught it. Elizabeth I had it, George Washington had it. So what did Edward Jenner do? Well for a long time country people had noticed that there was one group protected from this scary smallpox disease, the dairy maids. Why was that? It turns out that they got a weaker version of the illness from the cows they milked called cowpox. This is a drawing of the hand of the milkmaid Sarah Nelms. You can see the pus-filled blisters she got from the cowpox. This is what Edward Jenner was going to use to make the first ever vaccination. One sunny day in May 1796 Edward Jenner took the pus from Sarah's hand. He then put the pus into the open cut he'd made on the arm of little eight-year-old James Phipps, his gardener's son. James got a small fever from the cowpox and then he recovered. When Jenner injected him with the much more serious smallpox nothing happened. He was immune, he was safe. Edward Jenner had proved that by giving a person one virus you could protect them against a related and more dangerous one. He used the Latin word for cow, vacca, to describe this great new discovery and he coined the word vaccine. Do you know the difference between vaccination and immunisation? Vaccination is when a vaccine is given to you, usually by injection nowadays. Immunisation is what happens inside your body after you have the vaccine. It stimulates your immune system so that it can recognise the disease and protect you. After Jenner's experiment succeeded the French General Napoleon Bonaparte ordered his entire army to be vaccinated. In 1980 smallpox was officially wiped from the earth. You won't be surprised that there are statues, roads, buildings, even a crater on the moon named after Edward Jenner. So don't go forgetting his name. He was a great man.