The First Vaccine
In the 1790s, English doctor Edward Jenner was looking for a cure for a terrible disease called smallpox. Back then, no one knew about viruses. But many people had noticed that dairy workers, who milked the cows, almost never got smallpox. They did often catch a mild disease, called cowpox, from the cows. Jenner wondered, could the cowpox somehow be protecting them?
To test his idea, Jenner collected some cowpox pus from a cow. He rubbed a tiny bit into a scratch on the hand of his gardener’s 8-year-old son. The boy got a slight fever, but that was all. Then came the real test. Jenner injected the boy with live smallpox germs. The boy did not get sick at all. It worked!
The idea of protecting patients by letting them catch a (hopefully) mild case of a disease had been around since ancient times. It was risky—some patients got very sick. But Jenner had found a new twist. A de-activated germ could protect just as well, and with less danger. He called this technique “vaccination,” from the Latin word for cow, vacca. Today, with the help of Jenner’s vaccine and others, smallpox has vanished from the world.
