Edward Jenner

English physician and scientist

• Born: May 17, 1749
• Birthplace: Berkeley, Gloucestershire, England
• Died: January 26, 1823
• Place of death: Berkeley, Gloucestershire, England

Often called the father of immunology for his discovery that vaccination is a preventive measure against smallpox, Jenner pioneered the concept of using a modified form of a disease to produce immunity.

Early Life

Edward Jenner was born into an upper-middle-class family in Berkeley, England. His mother was the daughter of a clergyman, Henry Head; his father was the Reverend Stephen Jenner, a graduate of Oxford and the Anglican rector of Berkeley. Edward was the third and youngest son. His two older brothers, Stephen and Henry, became clergymen. He had three younger sisters, Mary, Sarah, and Ann; the youngest, Ann, was married to a clergyman.

In 1754, Edward’s father died. Stephen took over as rector at Berkeley and became head of the family, supervising the education of his younger brothers and sisters. When he was about eight years old, Edward was sent to school at Wotton-under-Edge, a village near Berkeley, under the tutorship of the Reverend Mr. Clissold. Later, he was sent to Cirencester to study with another scholarly but rigidly strict clergyman, Dr. Charles Washbourn. The young Jenner was instructed in religion, history, Greek, and Latin but was most interested in reading books on scientific topics and collecting bird nests, dormouse nests, insects, and fossils in the hills and meadows surrounding the school.

In 1762, at age thirteen, Jenner was sent to Sodbury, about 15 miles from Berkeley, as an apprentice to Daniel Ludlow, a surgeon trained in London and competent in his profession. During the first several years he spent with Ludlow, the youth studied books on anatomy, helped the surgeon with simple operations, and dissected animals to improve his knowledge of anatomy. By the time he was eighteen, Jenner had acquired the skills that enabled him to assist Ludlow in more complicated surgical procedures and even to treat patients himself.

Life’s Work

By 1770, Edward Jenner had learned all that Ludlow could teach him. His mentor suggested that this young man of stocky build, medium height, blond hair, and heavy-lidded blue eyes, with a wide mouth and blunt nose, go to London and study with one of the most eminent surgeons of the day, John Hunter. Hunter was known throughout Europe for his treatment of aneurysms and gunshot wounds and for his descriptions of collateral circulation and the distribution of the olfactory nerve. Jenner studied anatomy and surgery with Hunter at St. George’s Hospital for two years and also worked in Hunter’s dissecting room preparing specimens for display.

In 1771, Jenner was asked to accompany Captain James Cook as a naturalist on Cook’s second voyage, but the young physician decided instead to return to Gloucestershire in 1772 to assume the duties of a country doctor. Jenner soon established a successful practice in his home shire. He declined Hunter’s offer of a partnership in 1775, preferring a rural lifestyle to the bustle of London.

While engaged in the pursuits of his medical calling, Jenner continued to contribute to the literature of natural science in his observations of the physiology of hibernating animals, the nesting habits of the cuckoo, and the migration of birds. In 1778, after dissecting the heart of a person who had died of angina pectoris, he described blockage and ossification of the coronary arteries of the heart as a contributory factor in the progression of the disease. After 1785, Jenner observed that his old friend and teacher, John Hunter, exhibited all the symptoms of progressive angina. Unwilling to inform Hunter of his findings because of the possible negative emotional impact upon Hunter (angina was considered incurable at that time), Jenner refused to publish his views on the symptomatology of the disease. His observations were vindicated after Hunter’s death in 1793, when the autopsy report indicated that Hunter’s coronary arteries were considerably ossified. It was in 1799 that Dr. Caleb Parry, in his publication Inquiry into the Symptoms and Causes of the Syncope Anginosa, gave Jenner credit for the earlier suggestion that angina was caused by a structural change in the heart.

Soon after he returned to Gloucestershire to begin his medical practice, Jenner began the observations and experiments that would lead to the discovery some twenty-five years later of the principle of vaccination. In much of rural eighteenth century England, an eruption of blisters on the udders of cows, cowpox, was quite widespread. The contagious disease, harmless to the dairy animals, was transmitted onto the hands of milkmaids, who themselves developed minor lesions and a mild fever, followed by complete recovery. It was believed locally that a person infected with cowpox could not contract the much more dangerous disease smallpox. This infectious, disfiguring, and potentially lethal malady had periodically swept Europe, resulting in some 400,000 deaths annually. The practice of inoculation, introducing matter from the pustules of a person with an active case of smallpox into the skin of a person to be immunized from the disease, had been known from ancient times in India and China. The person inoculated usually contracted a milder case of smallpox with its associated discomforts, but occasionally the inoculation, often performed on children, resulted in death. (As a young boy, Jenner had been inoculated when an epidemic swept Gloucestershire. As part of the treatment, six weeks before the actual inoculation Jenner was bled, purged, and starved. As a result of this debilitating experience, young Edward’s health was shattered for many years.)

By 1780, Jenner was convinced that cowpox, which he differentiated from other lesions on the udders of cows and the hands of milkmaids, if introduced under the skin, would produce an immunity to smallpox, with few of the side effects associated with the inoculation process. Jenner had become convinced that a person who had contracted cowpox was indeed immune to smallpox, since he was unable to induce smallpox by inoculating persons who previously had contracted cowpox. When he discussed his theory in the scientific community, he was discouraged by the poor reception it received, and consequently he did not actively promote vaccination until the late 1790’s.

In 1783, Jenner published an eleven-page pamphlet entitled Cursory Observations on Emetic Tartar. This paper was the result of his discovery of a new process of purifying the drug used for inducing vomiting in an age when purges were the fashion. Five years later, he published Observations on the Natural History of the Cuckoo, wherein Jenner described the manner in which the parasitic cuckoo hatchling ejected young birds from the nest of the host sparrows. This scholarly work in ornithology earned for Jenner a fellowship in the prestigious Royal Society in 1789.

At the age of thirty-eight, on March 6, 1788, Jenner married Catherine Kingscote, a niece of the countess of Suffolk and a daughter of a wealthy landowner in Cheltenham. On January 24, 1789, their first child, Edward, was born. On July 8, 1792, the country physician and surgeon was made a doctor in medicine by the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, upon the recommendation of his old friends, Caleb Parry of Bath and Dr. John Hickes of Gloucester. In 1794, Jenner’s daughter, Catherine, was born. This same year he suffered a serious illness diagnosed as typhus fever, the third such episode in eight years. Jenner’s second son, Robert Fitzhardinge, was born in 1797.

Jenner’s growing reputation as a consulting physician enabled him to acquire a home in the aristocratic health spa of Cheltenham in 1795. He served as a member of the Cheltenham town council from 1806 to 1821 and practiced medicine there until 1820. As a result of the influential contacts that he made with the nobility and established physicians in Cheltenham, Jenner was able more easily to disseminate information about his controversial vaccination process.

On May 14, 1796, Jenner performed the first vaccination with cowpox serum on eight-year-old James Phipps, using material obtained from a pustule on the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a milkmaid who had contracted cowpox. Subsequently, Phipps was inoculated with smallpox material, but the disease did not develop in the boy. In 1798, Jenner continued his experiments with cowpox vaccine, convinced that immunity from smallpox for those inoculated with cowpox was the result. That same year, Jenner wrote a paper that listed the people vaccinated and the symptoms associated with induced cowpox. The work was submitted to the Royal Society, but that august body refused to publish it since the theory was considered too revolutionary. Jenner then published the treatise himself and titled it An Inquiry into Cause and Effects of the Variolæ Vaccinæ, a Disease Discovered in Some of the Western Counties of England, Particularly Gloucestershire, and Known by the Name of Cow Pox (1798).

The impact upon the world was immediate, although some opposition to the vaccination procedure resulted when a supply of vaccine contaminated with smallpox virus caused that disease to spread. By 1810, vaccination against smallpox was introduced in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Italy, France, Spain, India, the United States, and most of the rest of the world.

Jenner’s fame and modest fortune increased proportionately, but these successes were tempered by the death of his wife in 1815. Edward survived his beloved Catherine by eight years, dying quietly at his home, the Chantry, in Berkeley, on January 26, 1823.

Significance

On May 8, 1980, the World Health Assembly declared that the world was free from smallpox, the last case having been reported in Somalia in 1979. For the first time in the history of humankind, a dreaded disease had been conquered. This victory came as the result of Edward Jenner’s discovery of an antigenically related, nontransmissible virus that provided protection against smallpox.

Jenner’s historical impact should not be reckoned with only cold statistics regarding the tremendous numbers of lives saved as a result of his discovery of the principle of vaccination. Rather, he should also be remembered as the medical doctor who eschewed a monopoly of the cowpox vaccine and the great wealth that this exclusive knowledge would bring. He chose instead to disseminate the technique freely and selflessly to the whole world. He should be remembered not as the scholarly genius that some of his early biographers made him out to be but rather as a quiet, unassuming country physician whose observations of a disease over a twenty-five-year period resulted in one of the most beneficial medical discoveries ever.

Jenner was criticized in some quarters by those colleagues who, out of envy or ignorance, determined that his innovative discovery would result in a debacle. Those critics were silenced by the logic of Jenner’s scientific method and the ultimate success that vaccination programs in the nineteenth century had in reducing the number of smallpox victims worldwide.

Bibliography

Baron, John. The Life of Edward Jenner, M.D. 2 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1827. The first major biography of Jenner, by a friend and associate of many years, and still the main source of information on the medical scientist. Written in the rather stilted style of early nineteenth century England, this two-volume work contains many of the letters by and to Jenner that were to form the basis of later studies of Jenner and his discoveries.

Baxby, Derrick. Jenner’s Smallpox Vaccine. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1981. Baxby examines the historical origins of smallpox vaccines used by Jenner and his associates. The material is presented in a readable style, without the jargon one might ordinarily expect in a work dealing with such specific medical topics.

Bazin, Hervé. The Eradication of Smallpox: Edward Jenner and the First and Only Eradication of a Human Infectious Disease. Translated by Andrew Morgan and Glenise Morgan. San Diego, Calif.: Academic Press, 2000. A history of smallpox, focusing on how Jenner created a vaccine that would ultimately—if temporarily—eradicate the disease.

Dolan, Edward F., Jr. Jenner and the Miracle of Vaccine. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1960. A readable, well-written work done in the style of a novel. Accurate details of Jenner’s life have been garnered from primary and secondary sources.

Fisk, Dorothy. Dr. Jenner of Berkeley. London: Heinemann, 1959. This work by a British author is well-written and informative but is hampered by a somewhat ponderous style. There is, however, much information on Jenner’s life that would be useful to general readers.

Jenner, Edward, and John Hunter. Letters of Edward Jenner and Other Documents Concerning the Early History of Vaccination. Edited by Genevieve Miller. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. An annotated collection of more than one hundred previously unpublished letters from Jenner to forty-five different correspondents, including medical colleagues, friends, and others dealing with his interests in vaccination, natural history, and a wide range of other topics. The collection also includes five letters written by John Hunter, Jenner’s teacher and friend.

Kerns, Thomas A. Jenner on Trial: An Ethical Examination of Vaccine Research in the Age of Smallpox and the Age of AIDS. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1997. Examines how a modern review panel using today’s standards might judge the scientific and ethical design of Jenner’s first smallpox vaccine. Questions how the panel might weigh the risks and benefits to James Phipps and the adequacy of Jenner’s preliminary evidence. Compares eighteenth century standards of medical ethics review with review standards for AIDS research in the late twentieth century.

LeFanu, William R. A Bio-Bibliography of Edward Jenner, 1749-1823. London: Harvey and Blythe, 1951. A leading authority on Jenner discusses all publications by Jenner and, in addition, lists all letters known at the time by or to him in manuscript or printed form.

Roddis, Louis H. Edward Jenner and the Discovery of Smallpox Vaccination. Menasha, Wis.: George Banta, 1930. A small but informative offering with an introductory chapter on the history of smallpox. Written in a precise style, this work outlines Jenner’s early life, his medical career, his discovery of vaccination, the honors he received, and the final years of his life. A fine introduction to Jenner, the individual and the physician.

Saunders, Paul. Edward Jenner: The Cheltenham Years, 1795-1823. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982. This well-documented chronicle of Jenner’s vaccination campaign provides insights into the opposition and mistrust that Jenner met regarding vaccination. Fills the chronological gap that exists in John Baron’s The Life of Edward Jenner, M.D., during the height of his fame in Cheltenham and gives a new insight into Jenner’s circle of friends and social life.