Edward Jenner the father of vaccination

Edward Jenner, an English doctor, is known in the history of medicine as the person who discovered
vaccination. He was born in 1749 in a rural part of Great Britain. Jenner was a country boy and he loved the
quiet village he lived in. As a child Jenner liked to observe and investigate things. His favourite pastime
was studying nature and he loved and understood country life.
In Jenner’s times people all over the world were affected by a disease called smallpox*. Many of them had
the marks of the disease on their faces. But those were the people who had recovered from the disease;
many more used to die. In the eighteenth century, smallpox was one of the main causes of death and it was
common among both young and old. Of all the diseases at that time, smallpox was the worst.
Edward Jenner was a man who was always trying to gain knowledge wherever he could. Nothing ever
escaped his sight and hearing. Years before, he had heard a milkmaid say, ‘I can’t catch smallpox, I’ve had
the cowpox*.’ At first Jenner mentioned the milkmaid’s words to Dr. Ludlow, whose student he was. But
the doctor only laughed. Jenner did not say anything but he continued to ask himself how the harmless
cowpox could save people from smallpox. He believed that science had no limits and a scientist had to be
patient to succeed.
After years of trying, Jenner’s efforts to find a cure for this disease were not successful. Then one day he
decided to try an experiment and he rubbed some of the cowpox substance into a village boy’s cut. A few
weeks later he repeated it but this time with smallpox substance. The result was that the boy remained
healthy. Overcoming lots of difficulties, Jenner repeated his experiment twenty-three times, with the same
result. It was only then that he believed in his discovery and published the results. Jenner’s discovery of
vaccination against smallpox was one of the greatest discoveries in the history of medicine. In 1798 he
published a report, calling his new method ‘vaccination’, from the Latin word vacca, meaning a cow. At
first people paid no attention to the work of the country doctor. Some even said that vaccination might
cause people to get cows’ faces!
Soon the news of the wonderful discovery spread abroad and terrible smallpox began to disappear as if by
magic. Jenner was extremely happy to finally read a report saying that for two years there had been no cases
of smallpox in any part of the world. Edward Jenner died in 1823 at the age of seventy-four. Till the end of
his life, the ‘country doctor’ lived simply, spending on research the money the nation’s Parliament gave
him, and vaccinating free of charge anyone who came to him