Edward Jenner was born in Berkeley, England, in 1749. His father, a pastor in the Church of England, died when Edward was only five years old and it was his older brother, also a clergyman, who took care of him. At 13 he was apprenticed to a surgeon and by 20 he had accumulated enough knowledge to work with John Hunter, an eminent Scottish anatomist and surgeon who encouraged him to be curious and to support his ideas with experiments.
In those days, the world suffered from the scourge of smallpox, a terrible disease that caused the death of many people and those who survived were marked forever.
Smallpox had been a scourge for mankind since ancient times, and some cultures had developed rudimentary means of fighting it. Chinese culture collected the dried remains of the pustules from the sick and had them aspirated by healthy people to provide them with immunity. This ancient practice reached Europe in the 18th century. XVII. The Turks and the Greeks had discovered that the fluids extracted from smallpox pustules, when introduced into the skin of a healthy person, in many cases he experienced a mild episode of the disease and was immunized. Unfortunately this was not always the case and there were people who died after inoculation.
When Jenner began to practice medicine, the practice of inoculating patients with pus was widespread, despite the risk that this posed to many people.
A curious fact caught the attention of the young doctor: he had observed that cows also suffered from a similar disease and sometimes infected the people who worked with them. However, luckily for those infected, cowpox was benign in nature and sick people soon recovered with very little sequelae. What really caught Jenner’s attention was that these people were not infected with smallpox.
Jenner had the idea of inoculating a person with cowpox, or “vaccine,” to give them immunity against the terrible human smallpox. As is often the case, the novel idea clashed with established beliefs and many of his medical contemporaries dismissed it on the grounds that they had seen smallpox victims who had suffered from cowpox before.
On May 14, 1796, Edward Jenner, convinced of his theory, made one of those decisions that make a human being a hero or a villain for the rest of their lives. He decided to prove his theory by doing an experiment with an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps. We invite you to find out what happened by listening to this chapter of “Science and Geniuses”.
Jenner passed the test and, thanks to him, the smallpox vaccine spread throughout the world.
Two hundred years after that experiment, the World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated.
OTHERS SOFTWARE OF INTEREST:
Jenner and Balmís, doctors for humanity. Oceans of Science Podcast