English Doctor Edward Jenner performed the first vaccination in 1796 – and was met with considerable scepticism from a public worried about its safety and effectiveness.
ENGLISH Doctor Edward Jenner performed the first vaccination in 1796 – and was met with considerable scepticism from a public worried about its safety and effectiveness.
But in the two centuries since, the technique has saved millions of lives and eradicated smallpox – once a feared killer.
Smallpox first appeared more than 3,000 years ago and has been one of humanity’s greatest afflictions.
In Jenner’s day, it was responsible for one in ten infant deaths.
People had long noticed that smallpox survivors never caught the disease again – they became immune to it.
The same goes for many other infectious diseases.
When the body is exposed to a new bacteria or virus, the immune system produces chemicals called antibodies tailor-made to destroy them.
Those antibodies become a permanent feature of the immune system, in case of future infection with the same disease.
Vaccines contain bacteria or viruses that have been deactivated or weakened, or in some cases that cause a similar but much less serious disease.
They make our bodies produce the necessary antibodies without suffering the devastating impact of the full disease.
Before Jenner (1749–1823) attempted vaccination, doctors were using ‘variolation’ to make people immune to smallpox. Variolation relied on there being two types of smallpox.
Pus taken from someone with the weaker form was rubbed into a small incision in the skin of a healthy person.
Patients would suffer mild symptoms, including pustules, but most recovered and were then immune to both forms of the disease.
Variolation, also called inoculation, had been used for centuries across Asia.
It was introduced to Britain by the English author Mary Montagu (1689–1762), who had seen it in Constantinople.
There were risks with the technique: the weaker strain of smallpox was still life threatening and contagious.
Patients who had been inoculated had to remain isolated, often for weeks, and about one in a hundred died.
Jenner’s breakthrough was to use pus from someone with cowpox, which is not life-threatening.
Farmers in his native Gloucestershire noticed that milkmaids who had had cowpox never contracted smallpox – they seemed to be immune.
The boy Jenner vaccinated, James Phipps (1788-1853), suffered mild symptoms of cowpox after the treatment.
A few weeks later, Jenner inoculated him with smallpox.
Phipps suffered none of the normal symptoms of people who were inoculated – he was immune to smallpox.
An act of Parliament in 1840 outlawed variolation and ensured smallpox vaccination would be free for everyone.
Thirteen years later another act made it compulsory for every newborn in Britain to be vaccinated.
In 1880, French biologist Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) discovered a second vaccine, against cholera in chickens.
A year later he found a vaccine against anthrax and in 1884 a vaccine against rabies in dogs.
Today there are dozens of vaccines and widescale vaccination programmes have controlled or eradicated several deadly diseases.
As for smallpox, the World Health Organisation began a global vaccination and public health initiative in 1967.
In that year, two million people died from the disease. Since 1979, there has not been a single case.
