Benjamin Jesty, painted by Michael William Sharp. If he looks a little uncomfortable, that’s because he was. Jesty, who shunned publicity and did not like London, had steadfastly refused to swap his heavy country clothes for something more ‘fashionable’, and had to be soothed for his sitting by the artist’s wife, playing the piano.
BENJAMIN JESTY, a Dorsetshire farmer, heard from his dairymaids that the skin-rash caused by cowpox had one blessing: once you’d had it, you didn’t get smallpox.
So when smallpox broke out in Yetminster in 1774, Benjamin deliberately infected his wife Elizabeth and their two sons with cowpox, giving them lifelong immunity.
Rural doctors had long suspected this might work, and one Dr Fewster had presented a paper on the matter in London nine years before.
It was however not until 1796 that another Gloucestershire GP, Edward Jenner, conclusively proved their guess, protecting his gardener’s son from the potentially fatal effects of ‘variolation’, inoculation with deadly smallpox itself, by ‘vaccination’, infecting him first with harmless cowpox.*
Jenner’s success, scientific rigour and tireless advocacy slowly convinced the doubters. In 1840, variolation was banned by Parliament, and superseded by Jenner’s vaccination. Soon his technique was turning the tide against diseases from smallpox to polio, meningitis, measles, and tetanus.
‘Variolation’ derives from the scientific name for smallpox, ‘variola’. ‘Vaccination’ was coined by Jenner from the Latin word for a cow, ‘vacca’; Louis Pasteur widened its use to cover all kinds of inoculation using dead, weaker or related strains of a disease, in honour of Jenner.
Précis
The principle that an immunity to smallpox could be created using harmless cowpox was passed around as an old wives’ tale by dairymaids until 1774, when it was proved in practice by Benjamin Jesty, a Dorsetshire farmer, to be scientifically confirmed twenty years later by Gloucestershire surgeon Edward Jenner. Since then, their technique of vaccination has saved countless lives worldwide. (59 / 60 words)
