Jesty and Jenner’s Jab
Benjamin Jesty and Edward Jenner continue to save millions of lives because they listened to an old wives’ tale.
1774
King George III 1760-1820
Benjamin Jesty and Edward Jenner continue to save millions of lives because they listened to an old wives’ tale.
1774
King George III 1760-1820
Surgeon Edward Jenner (1749-1823) and farmer Benjamin Jesty (1736-1816) are rightly credited with saving more lives than anyone else, by conceiving and demonstrating the principle of vaccination. What is less often emphasised is that it only happened because they listened respectfully to an old wives’ tale.
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. As a way to stimulate a natural resistance to smallpox, it was certainly much safer than variolation, inoculating a subject with deadly smallpox itself.* It was however not until 1796 that another Gloucestershire GP, Edward Jenner, conclusively proved their guesses, protecting his gardener’s son from the potentially fatal effects of variolation 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 In 1840, variolation was banned by Parliament, and superseded by Jenner’s vaccination.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’. Inoculation is a word for stimulating an immune response by deliberately infecting the subject with the disease; variolation is specifically inoculation for smallpox.
‘Vaccination’ was coined by Jenner from the Latin word for a cow, ‘vacca’. In this instance, inoculation would not be accurate because that would have introduced smallpox into the patient, not cowpox. Jenner’s term was widened in meaning by Louis Pasteur, who used it to cover all kinds of inoculation using dead, weaker or related strains of a disease, in honour of Jenner. The term has since been widened to include viral vector vaccines such as Sputnik V, and even the mRNA therapy manufactured by Pfizer, which works in a quite different way. See COVID-19 Vaccine Basics at the CDC in the USA.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
How did Jesty save the lives of his wife and two sons?
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
One in fifty people died from variolation. Others suffered long-term effects. Edward Jenner was one of these.