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| Edward Jenner |
Have you had smallpox? Polio? Typhoid? Prob a bly not. However, such infectious diseases used to plague humankind The word plague comes from one of these killer diseases the bubonic plague. Throughout the four teenth and fifteenth centuries, the plague killed nearly half of the pop u la tion of Europe.
Smallpox killed over 100,000 people a year for a cen tury and left millions horribly scarred and disfigured The influenza epidemic of 1918 killed 25 million worldwide. Po lio killed thousands in the early twen ti eth cen tury and left millions paralyzed.
One simple dis
cov ery not only stopped the spread of each of these dis eases, it vir tu ally eradicated
them. That discovery was vaccinations. Vaccinations have saved millions of lives and have
pre vented unimaginable amounts of misery and suffering. American children
are now reg u larly vaccinated for as many as 15 diseases.
Twenty-four-year-old
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a well-known English poet, traveled to Turkey
with her husband in 1712 when he became the British ambassador. Lady Mary noticed that native populations in Turkey did not suffered from smallpox, the
dread disease that
had left her scarred and pock marked and that killed tens of thousands in England
She soon
learned that elderly tribal women performed what was called “in grafting.” Pre vi ous British travelers had dismissed the prac tice as a meaningless tribal ritual.
Lady Mary sus pected
that this annual event held the secret to their immunity from smallpox. Village fam i
lies would decide if any one in the family should have small pox that year. An old woman arrived carrying a nut shell full of infected liquid. She would open one of
the volunteer’s veins with a needle dipped in the liq uid, as the family sang and chanted.
The infected person
stayed in bed for two to three days with a mild fever and a slight rash. He or she was then as
well as be fore, never getting a s serious case of smallpox. Mary wondered
if English pop u la tions could be protected by engrafting.
Upon her return to England in 1713, Lady Mary lectured about the potential of in grafting. She was
dis missed as an un trained and “silly” woman. In early 1714 Caroline, Princess of Wales
Lady Mary collected the pus from small pox blisters of sick patients and in jected small amounts of the
deadly liquid into her test subjects. The death rate of those she in oc u
lated was less than
one-third that of the general public, and five times as many of her subjects got mild, non-scarring cases.
However, there
was a problem with in grafting. In oc u la tions with live smallpox viruses were dan ger
ous. Some patients died from the injec tions that were supposed to protect
them. Enter Edward Jenner, a young English surgeon, in 1794. Living in a rural community, Jenner noticed that milk maids almost never got small
pox. However, virtually all milk maids did get cow pox, a disease that
caused mild blistering on their hands. Jen ner the o rized that cow pox must
be in the same family as smallpox and that getting mild cow pox was like in grafting and made a person immune to the deadly smallpox.
He tested his
theory by injecting 20 children with liquid taken from the blisters of a milk
maid with cow pox. Each infected child got cow pox. Painful blisters formed
on their hands and arms, l lasting several days. Two months later, Jen ner in
jected live smallpox into each of his test children If Jenner’s theory
was wrong, many of these children would die. However, none of his test children
showed any sign of smallpox. Jenner invented the word “vaccination”
to describe his process when he announced his results in 1798. Vacca is
the Latin word for cow; vaccinia is Latin for cowpox.
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