In medicine if you’re going to be considered the “Father of Something,” immunology would be a great choice.
Edward Jenner is often called “the father of immunology” and it’s said his work may have saved more lives than the work of any other human.
To be fair, Jenner did not discover vaccination but he was the first person to confer scientific status on the procedure and to pursue its scientific investigation.
Vaccination replaced an earlier process called variolation — smallpox was also known as variola. Variolation involved inserting powdered smallpox scabs or fluid from pustules into superficial scratches or cuts made in the skin.
The process had a couple of serious downsides: the patient could die from smallpox or could (if not dead) infect others as a spreader.
In Jenner’s time, smallpox was killing about 10% of the population (all unvaccinated). Jenner was among five individuals in England and Germany in the 1770s who were interested in the use of material from cowpox and how it might provide immunity.
To illustrate that not all medical breakthroughs are achieved by physicians, a Dorset farmer named Benjamin Jesty was concerned about the presence of smallpox in his locality.
Determined to protect his family, he must have heard of the possibility of transferring traces of cowpox to provide immunity from the disease. He used material from udders of cattle that he knew had cowpox and transferred that material with a small lancet to the arms of his wife and two sons. They remained free of smallpox throughout their lives although they were exposed on numerous later occasions.
Well, Jenner was aware of the common observation that milkmaids were generally immune to smallpox but he knew there was a finite number of openings for that job. Thus, he postulated that the pus in the blisters that milkmaids received from cowpox (the disease similar to smallpox but much less virulent) protected them from smallpox.
He proceeded to test his hypothesis by inoculating the son of his gardener — if you want your dad to keep his job you’ll go along with this.
The story is that he scraped pus from cowpox blisters on the hands of a milkmaid who had caught cowpox from a cow named Blossom.
Blossom’s hide now hangs on the wall of the St. George’s Medical School Library, proving, once again, that no good deed goes unpunished.
Jenner’s gardener kept his job and the kid came through several other tests of variolus material with no serious side effects.
Flushed with his success, Jenner tested his hypothesis on 23 other subjects (who apparently did not work for him). He continued his research and reported it to the Royal Society, which didn’t publish the original paper (it didn’t look like it would sell in paperback).
However, he refined it. Donald Hopkins, former director of all health programs at The Carter Center has written, “Jenner’s unique contribution was not that he inoculated a few persons with cowpox, but that he proved that they were immune to smallpox. Moreover, he demonstrated that the protective cowpox pus could be effectively inoculated from person to person not just directly from cattle.”
Edward Jenner’s pioneering paved the way for continued development in vaccination leading to virtual eradication of smallpox, polio and other diseases.
Vaccination is a key to stopping pandemics in their tracks.
He’d be disappointed in the death rate today from the current pandemic of the unvaccinated and so would Blossom.
