Chronic Diseases: The Discovery Of Vaccines

Edward created the world’s first vaccine by doing a extremely daring experiment with a chance of a child dying according to

It was during the smallpox epidemic during the late 1700s, when almost 80% of those who caught the smallpox died. He overheard a girl say that she could not get the smallpox disease because she already had a disease called the cowpox. This has triggered Edward Jenner to carry out a research on this information. He observed that those who worked with cattles and had caught a much milder disease; cowpox, never got smallpox. He was persistent and needed to prove this theory so he conducted an experiment on one of his smallpox patients where he

attempts to thwart it, they have found ways to fight disease. Medicine has made significant leaps in

The story of vaccines did not begin with the first vaccine–Edward Jenner’s use of material from cowpox

Ever since 1786 when Edward Jenner created the first vaccine, millions of diseases have been prevented. Diseases that used to be common in

In 1881, Louis Pasteur furthered the evolution of vaccinology, the study of vaccines, by creating the first Anthrax and Rabies vaccines (“A Brief History,” 2015).

Over 200 years ago, when a person suddenly developed a cough, sore throat, and fever it could mean certain death. Today there is no need to be alarmed, we make a visit to the doctor's office and leave with a diagnosis and medication that will make us feel better in a matter of a few days. Sometimes an x-ray or blood work may be required to help with a diagnosis. The major advances in health care can be directly related to the discoveries of several people. Edward Jenner, Louis Pasteur, Joseph lister, and Wilhelm Roentgen.

Edward Jenner was born on May 17, 1749 and died on January 26, 1823. He was an English Physician that created the vaccination for the small pox vaccine. He based it on research done by a farmer that infected his wife and children with the pus of the blisters from milkmaids that had generally been immune to the cow pox virus. Since the cow pox virus was less of a threat than the small pox. But it would take 20 years for Jenner’s procedure to be understood.

The history of vaccination is something that both medical and public health students study as the basic foundational building blocks of modern western biomedicine. In the late 1700s, a man by the name of Edward Jenner, an English physician and scientist, inoculated an 8-year old boy with the pus drawn from the cowpox lesions of a dairy milkmaid (Green, 2015). The hypothesis at the time was that since milkmaids had a lower incidence of small pox while still having lessor cases of cowpox that the two were related. Researchers in Germany and England , through extensive testing, had supported this hypothesis. Jenner though was the first to make widespread use of the variolation.

Robert Koch showed that organisms can be identified as the cause of diseases. He laid the foundation for modern medical microbiology. Koch's work was influencing the development of the germ theory and Joseph Lister was was influencing surgeries in the operating rooms. Lister began soaking surgical dressings in carbolic acid which prevented infection. Other surgeons started doing the same and it controlled the spread of infectious microorganisms.

Beyond cowpox. Although Jenner’s milkmaid experiments may now seem like quaint fables, they provided the scientific basis for vaccinology. This is all the more striking given that our current conceptions of vaccine development and therapy are now much more encompassing and firmly rooted in the science of immunology. Until the brilliant French chemist Louis Pasteur developed what he called a rabies vaccine in 1885, vaccines referred only to cowpox inoculation for smallpox. Although what Pasteur actually produced was a rabies antitoxin that functioned as a post-infection antidote only because of the long incubation period of the rabies germ, he expanded the term beyond its Latin association with cows and cowpox to include all

Apparently, the term vaccine actually came from the smallpox epidemic. It was first used by Jenner's friend, Richard Dunning in 1800. The term vaccine/vaccination referred only to

Pasteur began working on the problem of bacterial contamination when a local wine merchant approached him asking advice on how to keep his wine from souring. Pasteur's goal was to prove that yeast, which produces lactic acid, caused the souring of both wine and milk. One experiment he did was to prove that no fermentation of grape juice would happen if the grapes and the containers they were kept in remained sterile through the experiment. He inserted

On April 12, 1955, a vaccine injection developed by Jonas Edward Salk was introduced to the public.  It succeeded in protecting people from paralytic poliomyelitis (polio).  Shortly thereafter, an even better oral vaccination was developed by Albert Sabin.  These discoveries, considered the greatest medical advance of the time, can be directly attributed to these two men, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin.

Many different motivations set Pasteur’s work into motion. At the young age of nine, Pasteur observed first-hand that people developed rabies from dogs infected with rabies. This might sound like common sense, but in the early 19th century, microbiology and the exploration of infectious diseases were just being realized and discovered by scientists. The rabies problem started to grow rapidly in France and veterinarians reached out to Pasteur for help. After Pasteur accepted this challenge he applied what he observed as a boy and to many things he had learned and discovered since then. Finally in 1884 he was able to discover how to treat infected dogs, and then in 1885 he successfully treated his first human rabies victim.