Imagine a world where an incurable disease causing the progressive destruction of nerve cells which leads to the wasting of muscles, paralysis, and death runs rampant. A different virus wreaks havoc on the liver of those infected, causing cirrhosis, liver failure and occasionally death. People perish from another disease causing pneumonia (infection of the lungs), bacteremia (infection of the blood), and meningitis (infection of the covering of the brain and spinal cord). Meningitis specifically causes deafness and brain damage and kills 10% of children who contract it. This dystopia represents life without vaccinations for polio, hepatitis B and pneumococcal disease.
On May 14th, 1796, Edward Jenner, an English country doctor from Gloucestershire, took fluid from a cowpox blister and scratched it into the skin of 8 year old James Phipps. A blister rose up on the spot, but it soon dissipated. On July 1st, 1796, Jenner introduced the boy to smallpox matter, but no symptoms or disease ensued. This was the birth of vaccinations.
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Smallpox causes a multitude of skin blisters and lesions, accompanied by dangerous fevers. Over the centuries, smallpox claimed the lives of millions. It possessed a fatality rate between 20-60% and in infants, the disease killed over 80% of those it infected. Those who survived were left with pock marked faces as a reminder of the agony they endured. Jenner discovered a successful inoculation to smallpox, saving millions of lives and inspiring more scientists to investigate preventative treatment to other critical
1853- Vaccination for smallpox was made compulsory and started by Edward Jenner; this was because a great amount of people were getting ill and dying from it.
Despite the disappearance of the plague, smallpox still ran rampant throughout the world. The terrible disease continued to kill millions of Europeans every year. An inoculation created in the early 1700s was a somewhat successful solution and thousands of Europeans underwent the operation to engraft their skin with smallpox (Doc 2). However, new, more efficient solution came in the form of Edward Jenner, who created the first smallpox vaccine by collecting cowpox from an infected person and inserting it into another individual’s arm (Doc 6). Edward Jenner’s new vaccine was virtually harmless and was the most efficient vaccination to date. The smallpox vaccine eradicated the disease in Europe and eventually, the entire world. Smallpox was the last great disease that Europeans faced and its elimination allowed Europe’s population to grow and
It was during this era that Edward Jenner invented a vaccine to prevent smallpox by inoculating a healthy eight-year old boy with cowpox;
However, Jenner’s invention became a common practice only a few years after he released it to the public, and according to The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia, “By 1890 smallpox had virtually been eradicated from Britain.” (“Jenner, Edward (1749-1823)”) From the information about the first vaccination, we can see that vaccinations have been proven to eliminate deadly diseases, whether they receive opposition or not. Without immunizations, we would be overcome with diseases, such as smallpox, polio, and measles.
Edward Jenner, the British doctor who developed the first vaccine, made vaccines acceptable around the world, made the eradication of smallpox possible, and assisted in the discovery of the disease agent known as the virus (Porter 272; Youngerman 17). One day in May 1796 met a dairymaid named Sarah Nelmes, who had a smallpox lesion on her hand (King 3). He used the matter from her lesion to inoculate an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps, leaving with a mild reaction for only nine days (King 3). Later, Jenner inoculated James again, but this time with smallpox matter: “No disease developed, and protection was complete” (King 3).The benefits of Jenner’s vaccine were immeasurable: a vaccinated person was incapable of spreading the disease, rashes were extremely rare, and death was considered to be in the “rarest of circumstances” (Greenspan 9). Getting the Jenner’s results published was no piece of cake. The prestigious Royal Society even informed him that he should not “promulgate such a wild idea if he valued his reputation” (Greenspan 9). However, later Jenner received many honors and worldwide recognition for his efforts, but he was so zealous in his works that his private life severely suffered (King 4-5). President Thomas Jefferson wrote the following letter to Jenner in
The earliest case of smallpox according to a journal published in the US National Library of Medicine titled, “Edward Jenner and the History of Smallpox and Vaccination” was recorded as early as 1122 BC. (Riedel “Smallpox the Origin of a Disease”). Mankind’s triumph over this horrible disease was initiated by an English doctor named Edward Jenner. Through observations and experimentation, Jenner would create a procedure now known as vaccination. (Riedel “Edward Jenner”). During the next two centuries, vaccinations would be used worldwide to stop the spread of small pox. After the successful worldwide vaccination campaign led by the World Health Organization, small pox was eradicated worldwide in 1980. As a result of the eradication of smallpox according
In the late 1700’s, Edward Jenner published his work on the development of a smallpox vaccination. Nearly a century later, Louis Pasteur goes on to formulate the Germ Theory of Disease. Two years later, Pasteur goes on to create the first live attenuated bacterial vaccine for chicken cholera. Six years later, the rabies vaccination is developed by the same man.
Smallpox is a viral disease that causes pus-filled boils on the dermis. It looks similar to chickenpox, but has certain characteristic differences. Unlike chickenpox, smallpox is lethal in 30% of the cases and leaves the victim with disfiguring scars and/or blindness. Smallpox has now been eradicated through aggressive vaccination. The last case was reported in Somalia in the late 1970’s. After 2 years of worldwide surveillance, the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed that the disease had been eradicated.
Immunization, as of today, is widely different from the methods of immunization used hundreds of years ago. Buddhist monks swallowed snake venom to receive immunity to snake bites, and variolation, the act of spreading cowpox infected skin on non-infected skin to gain immunity to smallpox, was exercised in China during the 1600s. In 1796, after injecting a 13-year-old-boy with vaccinia virus(cowpox) and validated immunity to cowpox, Edward Jenner is acknowledged as the founder of vaccinology. The first smallpox vaccine was produced in the year of 1798. Over the course of the 1700s and the 1800s, smallpox was eradicated due to the efficient application worldwide, which led to the vaccine being eradicated in 1979 (Immunization Advisory Centre).
First, in 1796, a doctor named Edward Jenner performed the very first vaccination. “Taking pus from a cowpox lesion on a milkmaid’s hand, Jenner inoculated an eight-year-old boy, James Phipps. Six weeks later Jenner variolated two sites on Phipps ' arm with smallpox, yet the boy was unaffected by this as well as subsequent exposures” (Minna & Markel, 2005)& (Cave, 2008). The first vaccination allowed people to recognize that it was beneficial for their health. It provided the base for the rest of the variations of vaccinations to come. Vaccinations began with the notion that it is rooted in the science of immunology. Throughout history, there have been many variations of this first vaccine for things such as small pox, mumps, malaria and guinea worm. (The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, n.d.)
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.
Today most children in the United States live a much healthier life and parents live with much less anxiety due to vaccinations. More than 200 years ago, Edward Jenner conducted an experiment that would be one of the most astounding breakthroughs in medical history. Jenner noticed that milkmaids didn’t catch the smallpox, a disease rampant across the English countryside. He reasoned that the blisters on the milkmaid’s hand must contain something that was protective. He tested his theory by taking fluid from a blister on the wrist of a milkmaid and inoculating it into the arm of a local laborer’s son (Offit and
“There is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunized against measles. I was unable to that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered. Today a good and safe vaccine is available to every family and all you have to do is to ask your doctor to administer it’ (Roald Dahl). Edward Jenner, an english doctor, the father of immunology and pioneer of the smallpox vaccination was born in Berkeley, Gloucestershire. At the age of 14, Edward was apprenticed to a local surgeon and trained in London. Early in 1772 he went back to Berkeley and spent his time as a doctor in his native town. Several
According to my research, in 1796 Dr. Edward Jenner developed a vaccine for smallpox disease however during this time only cows were infected. This vaccine came from the cowpox virus. In 1809, the state of Massachusetts became the first to mandate the smallpox vaccinations then in 1879 a group of Anti-Vaccination of America was formed and their belief is that no one should be forced to vaccination. They believed that the vaccine was spreading the disease instead of preventing it. In 1986