Edward Jenner and Vaccinations

Edward Jenner (1749-1823) was a pioneer in the study of viruses and immunization against diseases. His work has been built upon by many successors who have discovered new vaccinations to reduce suffering and death, particularly for children.

Watch the video at: http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/30004-100-greatest-discoveries-the- beginning-of-vaccinations-video.htm

The Discovery of Vaccines

Edward Jenner performed the first vaccination. In the eighteenth century an English country doctor named Edward Jenner began to study the link between smallpox and the milder disease, cowpox. By injecting one boy with the cowpox he found that the boy became immune to smallpox. Edward Jenner published his findings in 1798 and within three years 100,000 people in Britain had been vaccinated.

Louis Pasteur’s 1885 rabies vaccine was the next to make an impact on human disease. And then, at the dawn of bacteriology, developments rapidly followed. Antitoxins and vaccines against diphtheria, tetanus, anthrax, cholera, plague, typhoid, tuberculosis, and more were developed through the 1930s.

Today, Edward Jenner is remembered as the pioneer of the smallpox vaccination and the father of the science of Immunology. Smallpox was the most feared and greatest killer of Jenner's time. In today's terms it was as deadly as cancer or heart disease. It killed 10% of the population, rising to 20% in towns and cities where infection spread easily. The majority of its victims were infants and children. Jenner called it the Speckled Monster. In 1980, as a result of Jenner's discovery, the World Health Assembly officially declared "the world and its peoples" free from endemic smallpox.

Smallpox and the Anti-vaccination Leagues in England

Widespread smallpox vaccination began in the early 1800s, following Edward Jenner’s cowpox experiments, in which he showed that he could protect a child from smallpox if he infected him or her with lymph from a cowpox blister. Jenner’s ideas were novel for his time, however, and they were met with immediate public criticism. The rationale for this criticism varied, and included sanitary, religious, scientific, and political objections.

For some parents, the smallpox vaccination itself induced fear and protest. It included scoring the flesh on a child’s arm, and inserting lymph from the blister of a person who had been vaccinated about a week earlier. Some objectors, including the local clergy, believed that the vaccine was “unchristian” because it came from an animal. For other anti-vaccinators, their discontent with the smallpox vaccine reflected their general distrust in medicine and in Jenner’s ideas about disease spread. Suspicious of the vaccine’s efficacy, some skeptics alleged that smallpox resulted from decaying matter in the atmosphere. Lastly, many people objected to vaccination because they believed it violated their personal liberty, a tension that worsened as the government developed mandatory vaccine policies.

Although the time periods have changed, the emotions and deep-rooted beliefs—whether philosophical, political, or spiritual—that underlie vaccine opposition have remained relatively consistent since Edward Jenner introduced vaccination.

Go to History of Vaccines website and view the images from the Anti- Vaccine Movement: http://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/history-anti-vaccination- movements

International Investment

Since Jenner’s discovery, governments have often invested, albeit unevenly and incompletely, in vaccines. Initially vaccines were considered a matter of national pride and prestige. They quickly became integral to public health notions of societal security, productivity, and protection. For example, in the United States and Europe in the 1800’s everyone had to get small pox vaccinations. In the 1900’s, childhood immunizations were required for public school attendance. After the founding of the World Health Organization (WHO) and related organizations such as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), vaccine programs went global.

Elusive Vaccines

It took more than eighty years after Jenner’s discovery for scientists to develop new vaccines. With the bacteriological revolution, which began in the 1880s, came high hopes that the identification of specific disease- causing microbes would lead directly to the development of more vaccines. The production of vaccines have changed the course of human history, but ther are still many diseases that remain elusive, such as Malaria and HIV.

Edward Jenner vaccinating James Phipps

Photo of Anti-Vaccine Postcard