Hello. This week we're passing the time whilst waiting for vaccination by talking to you about
the early pioneer of vaccination, Edward Jenner. For those of you that don't know
Jenner is the late 18th Century country doctor who gave us, in time, the concept
of vaccination against smallpox, and started the world down the road to where we are today,
where smallpox only now exists entirely controlled laboratories for research.
To highlight what it was up against smallpox was THE disease of fear dating back to ancient
egyptian times. You're looking at something that had been devastating populations for four and a
half thousand years. Now be warned please. we've got some graphic images coming up if you don't
want to see them please pause and jump to the time that we're showing in the caption below. Thank you.
OK, still with us? well smallpox starts, as many viruses do, with flu-like symptoms and
then the dreaded rash appears. Within two days that rash turns into abscesses which break open
and scab over, and when those scabs fall away, assuming you're still alive, it will have left
you scarred, disfigured, and possibly even blind. It was incredibly contagious and it
was no respecter of class either. Anne of Cleves, Mary the First, and Elizabeth the First all spent their
adult lives with the scars of earlier smallpox, and there was no cure. And there still isn't.
Now it was in his early teens when Jenner was an apprentice to Daniel Ludlow, a Gloucester
surgeon, that he overheard a milkmaid comment that she was safe from smallpox
as she had already had cowpox. This is a similar but milder virus of the same family
and it was an unavoidable occupational hazard amongst dairy workers.
Now taking this on board he completed his training as a doctor at St. George's
Hospital for the Poor on Hyde Park Corner under the guidance of renowned regency surgeon
John Hunter who was one of the foremost teaching surgeons and medical tutors of his day and very
much encouraged his students to be pioneers. His mantra was "Don't think about it. Try it" and Jenner
would very much buy into this manner of thinking. If you're interested by the way St. George's
Hospital is still standing in London and is now the Lanesborough Hotel. In 1770 you could stay
there for free. Now it'll cost you £600 per night but your chances of survival are much higher.
Now with his training complete, despite many offers of tenure as a surgeon, Jenner returned to
Gloucestershire to become the country doctor he'd always thought he should be, and given that this
placed him back amongst the farming community we should be grateful that he did. Two things focused
Jenner's mind in this role. The comments of the milkmaid and Hunter's "don't think, do" mantra and
as he noted that the Gloucestershire milkmaids are all blessedly free of the skin disfigurations
of smallpox the cowpox theory started to gain more and more traction in his mind. But thinking was not
doing and Jenner needed to prove his theory. The time to stop thinking and start trying was now.
Now he did this by taking a sample of infected pus from a local milkmaid Sarah Nelmes who he had
recently diagnosed as having contracted cowpox. He then made a cut in the arm of his gardener's son,
eight-year-old James Phipps and stitched it with thread soaked in Sarah Nelmes' infected pus thus
giving Phipps the live cow pox. He then sat back and let the boy recover. Then, a few days
after recovery, he made another cut in the young boy's arm and stitched it with a thread
soaked in a sample of smallpox infected pus and waited to see what happened, and thankfully
the boy recovered. Jenner had taken the first steps in beating smallpox.
Following his discovery he contacted a range of people in medical society to spread the news and
he got short shrift from the medical community. In fact he was almost thrown out of the Royal Society!
Seriously though! We look at this as the stuffy establishment getting in the way of science and
progress, but let's look at the facts here. He'd just deliberately given an eight-year-old child
smallpox. A four and a half thousand year-old incurable disease. Back in 1990 we, and the press,
absolutely crucified Agriculture Secretary John Gummer who fed his daughter a burger to
prove that british beef was safe from mad cow disease. Here's Jenner infecting somebody else's
child with a proven killer. If you tried this today you'd be struck off by the General Medical Council,
and rightly so. However, fortunately for us in the future, Jenner could carry on with his experiments
on children, which included his own son, and with enough data and enough successes he published his
findings in 1797 to a very hostile reception, which pretty much forced him to leave London.
Now again, hindsight is a wonderful thing, but the anti-vaxxer movement of the late 18th century
is a group i do have some sympathy with. To the urban dwelling city people there was no visible
difference between cowpox and smallpox and thus it is a massive leap of faith to let this guy
from the country waltz in and give your child a disease. An incurable disease of that. Let me ask
you, if somebody came out of the countryside and announced a program of giving your kids a form
of ebola or HIV how would you react? Cartoons made a mockery of Jenner's ideas like this one from 1802 showing
people sprouting cow heads but he was not deterred and he finally managed to get his findings
endorsed by the 112 members of the Physical Society of London, today the Institute of Physics.
Vaccination, which comes from the latin vacca, meaning cow, was a go and the debate would rage
on for decades. Jenner continued to vaccinate more and more people from a hut in his garden which
he called the Temple of Vaccinia and eventually smallpox vaccination became compulsory in 1835.
30 years after jenna had died. This work paved the way for more and more research and more and more
trials and today we live in a world where smallpox is all but extinct. Where vaccinations occur across
many countries for many different diseases. So when we finally get our COVID vaccination please
remember where this worldwide beneficial operation started out. With a country doctor named Edward,
a milkmaid named Sarah, and a cow named Blossom Thanks for watching. Stay healthy. See you next week