HEALTH

Jenner and the First Vaccine

1796 CE

History · Early Modern · Holocene · Meghalayan

In 1796, Edward Jenner inoculated a child with cowpox and showed that this mild disease of cattle protected against smallpox: the first vaccine.

Vaccination, whose name derives from the Latin vacca, cow, proceeds from the empirical observation that people who had contracted cowpox, a mild form affecting cattle and transmissible to milkmaids, did not develop smallpox. Edward Jenner established the verification in 1796 by inoculating a child with matter from a cowpox pustule, then deliberately exposing him to smallpox without his developing the disease. The principle involved is immune memory: after an infection, the organism retains recognition of the structures of the germ encountered, and the two viruses present sufficient similarity for that recognition to apply to either. A mild infection thus confers protection against a lethal one. The practice spreads worldwide within a few years and replaces variolation, a more dangerous procedure.

Why it matters

Vaccination constitutes the first procedure permitting a disease to be prevented systematically and at scale without having to contract it. It founds immunology, transforms public health policy and makes conceivable the eradication of a human disease, actually obtained for smallpox in 1980. Its origin is a field observation and not laboratory work.

Dating & uncertainty

Jenner's first documented vaccination dates from May 1796. He is not the first to inoculate cowpox, and the identity of the virus contained in his vaccine remains uncertain: genomic analysis of preserved historical strains points towards a vaccinia-type virus or one related to horsepox rather than towards cowpox proper.

Our species’ history as one day

23:58:561 min 3 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day