Edward Jenner - experiments

As his career and love life blossomed, Jenner bought the Chantry as a home fit for a family, a surgery and a place to continue his research. I think when Jenner returned to Gloucestershire he used the contacts he'd made in London, John Hunter in particular, and the letters from Hunter to Jenner over the next 20 years or so really reveal the depth of their friendship. There's a wonderful cross-section of gifts and other things sent to John Hunter by Jenner and others. So we have, most importantly, specimens of two cuckoos dissected by Jenner, specimens that were instrumental in elevating Jenner into the greatest elite of London scientific society, Fellowship of the Royal Society. Regardless of this elevation, Hunter continued to mentor him. The two were in almost constant correspondence. It was Hunter who famously challenged him, why think? Why not try the experiment? It was this advice that kept Jenner pursuing his practical research. Like his mentor, Jenner was never the conventional scientist. Jenner's a man of many parts, not all of them totally functional I have to say. He was a very brilliant mind but he was quite an imperfect scientist in many ways. He cut corners at times that I think nowadays would not be regarded as best practice. It took him a long, long time to follow his experiments through. Hard to know whether he'd survive as an effective grant-getter and a publisher in today's climate, for example. But it's unfair to portray him as a sort of bumbling country doctor. He was in practice though, but he was already a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1793, Hunter suffered a massive stroke and never recovered. So where did this leave Jenner? He continued to experiment. At the request of the President of the Royal Society, he looked into the use of human blood as a fertiliser. Sadly, it didn't improve his raspberry crop. He invented a medicine widely adopted by doctors to induce vomiting, but against advice didn't patent it. Jenner rarely bothered to profit from his discoveries. Motivated, I think, like Hunter, by the spirit of scientific inquiry.