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Biomedical Ephemera, or: A Frog for Your Boils

A blog for all biological and medical ephemera, from the age of Abraham through the era of medical quackery and cure-all nostrums. Featuring illustrations, history, and totally useless trivia from the diverse realms of nature and medicine. Buy me a coffee so I can stay up and keep the lights on around here!

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Today in History - May 14

Berkeley, Gloucestershire, England, 1796

On May 14, 1796, Edward Jenner performed the first of his 23 case studies involving inoculating people with cowpox (Vaccinia virus) in order to protect them from the worst effects of smallpox (Variola virus).

Dr. Jenner took the pus from a blister on the hand of milkmaid Sarah Nelmes, who had contracted cowpox from a cow named Blossom. He then injected this virus into eight-year-old James Phipps, allowing him to develop cowpox (similar to, but far less deadly than smallpox), and once he was healed, exposed him to smallpox. When James developed no symptoms, Edward Jenner presented a paper proposing widespread vaccination against smallpox to the Royal Society of London.

Both clergy and traditional physicians expressed credulity and disgust at the idea, despite the fact that it had been shown decades earlier to be a plausible concept - in 1721 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had herself and her children inoculated with cowpox sores after witnessing the procedure in Istanbul, and not 20 years earlier, Dr. Benjamin Jesty had success inoculating himself and his wife with cowpox during a particularly deadly smallpox outbreak.

More recent studies have shown that the practice of cowpox inoculation against smallpox may have occurred in China over 2500 years ago, but it was never widespread, and the west never truly caught on to the idea until Dr. Jenner proved with twenty-two subsequent subjects (including his own 11-month-old son) that cowpox inoculation was effective and far safer than smallpox itself. Following his second presentation on the subject at the Royal Society of London (including the case studies of his own family), the concept was still widely ridiculed by clergy and some of the public, but the efficacy was no longer seen as a matter of being an “Old Wives Tale”.

Despite his being far from the first to assert the value of vaccination, Edward Jenner is still seen as the one who saved “more lives than anyone else in human history”, because he’s the one who persisted and found a way to convince the community at large of the efficacy of the procedure. After all, in the words of Francis Galton,

In science, credit goes to the man who first convinces the world, not the man to whom the idea first occurs.

More on Edward Jenner and Smallpox:

Edward Jenner at Columbia University

BBC History: Edward Jenner

History Learning Site: Edward Jenner

Proceedings of the Baylor University Medical Center: Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination

#medical history #history #today in history #smallpox #disease #Edward Jenner #18th century #1790s #1796 #medical #science #immunization #vaccine #inoculation #case study

biomedicalephemera

Top: Edward Jenner performing his initial inoculation experiments in 1796 Bottom: Typical presentation of vaccination site when successfully inoculated.

You know those shots and nasal sprays you get for vaccinations these days? Well, it wasn't always like that. Though the practice of intentionally infecting people with Variola minor (much less fatal) to avoid Variola major goes back all the way to ancient China, Edward Jenner performed the most well-documented trials of using inoculation with Vaccinia virus (cowpox), in order to avoid later infection from smallpox.

Jenner, and many other physicians of the period, noticed that milkmaids and other farm-hands who had close contact with cows almost never became infected with smallpox during outbreaks, and hypothesized that the reason was due to the fact that they'd previously been infected by cowpox. To prove this fact, Jenner actually used his own children as guinea pigs, and inoculated them with the fluid from a cowpox sore on a milkmaid. To do this, he had to puncture the dermis with the infectious agent, and the child would contract a generally mild cowpox infection several days later.

As you can see on the lower image, the effects on the skin were not pretty, and the virus often caused substantial scarring, which can still be seen on most people who received the vaccines - just ask any relative growing up before the 1950s, and they probably still have that scar!

The method of Vaccinia virus inoculation to prevent serious smallpox infection was also much more dangerous than vaccination methods we have today. Approximately 1 in 1000 people would die from the initial methods , and approximately 1 in 75,000 people would die from the last methods used before we discontinued routine vaccination. This is because the virus was not attenuated (weakened) at first, and even when it was, you still had to have the body react as if it were infected in order to receive any immunity. It was a lot worse than the acute soreness some of today's vaccinations give us, but it still saved thousands of lives - Variola major had a 35% mortality rate in unvaccinated people.

Top: "The Vaccination (1796)" by Gaston-Theodore Melingue, 1879. Bottom: Pediatrics: The Hygienic and Medical Treatment of Children. Thomas Morgan Retch, 1906.

#vaccine #edward jenner #history of medicine #medical #18th century #1796 #1790s #smallpox #variola #painting #Melingue #pediatrics #inoculation