English country doctor who tested and published the method
Benjamin Jesty
Dorset farmer who inoculated his family with cowpox in 1774
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Brought the practice of variolation to Britain from Constantinople in 1721
Plate 056
1796
Berkeley, Gloucestershire, England
No photograph is shown for this exhibition. The museum displays an image only where it can show the object honestly.
About this date
Edward Jenner tested cowpox material on James Phipps in May 1796. Benjamin Jesty had done something similar in 1774, and variolation was practised much earlier.
About credit
Rural people already believed cowpox protected against smallpox, and variolation was used in Asia, Africa and the Middle East before Europe. Jenner’s contribution was to test and publish it.
Chapter II
The world before
Life before Vaccination
Smallpox killed roughly three in ten of those who caught it and left many survivors scarred or blind.
II
The human achievement
How it came about
Jenner took matter from a cowpox sore on a dairymaid and scratched it into the arm of a boy. Later he showed that the boy resisted smallpox. He published his results in 1798. The word “vaccine” comes from vacca, Latin for cow.
III
Understanding the invention
How it works
Vaccination, explained in two steps.
01
Step 01 of 02
Training the body
A mild infection teaches the immune system to recognise a similar threat.
Training the body
Memory cells
IV
The transformation
What changed for humanity
Public health
Mass vaccination controlled epidemics.
Medicine
Established the principle used for many later vaccines.
Vaccination led to the eradication of smallpox, declared in 1980. It is the only human disease eradicated so far.
V
Before and after
Life before and after Vaccination
Before
Fear of a deadly, disfiguring disease.
After
Immunity through a scratch on the arm.
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