First Smallpox Vaccination
The first successful smallpox vaccination was administered by Dr. Edward Jenner on May 14, 1796, in Berkeley, England. This groundbreaking procedure utilized cowpox, a less harmful virus, to induce immunity against the deadly smallpox virus, which historically caused severe epidemics and high mortality rates. Smallpox was particularly devastating to populations lacking immunity, including indigenous groups in the Americas, who faced catastrophic declines after European contact. Prior to Jenner's innovation, variolation was used as a preventative measure, involving the deliberate infection of a healthy person with a mild strain of smallpox, but it carried significant risks. Jenner's method, termed "vaccination," demonstrated a safer and more effective means of conferring immunity, sparking widespread adoption in England and across Europe. The global vaccination efforts that followed ultimately led to the eradication of smallpox, declared by the World Health Organization in 1980 after decades of comprehensive public health campaigns. This achievement marked a monumental milestone in medical history, illustrating the profound impact of vaccination on public health.
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First Smallpox Vaccination
First Smallpox Vaccination
On May 14, 1796, Dr. Edward Jenner of Berkeley, England, gave the first successful smallpox vaccination. His technique would save hundreds of millions of lives over the following two centuries and led to the eventual eradication of the disease throughout the world.
Smallpox is a highly contagious virus which causes an eruption of pus-filled sores all over the victim's body. It leads to death when the heart, lungs, or brain is infected, which happens in a significant percentage of cases. Smallpox was a common disease for many centuries, and epidemics frequently broke out in Europe. Some countries lost over 20 percent of their populations during such epidemics. When the Europeans discovered the New World in 1492, they inadvertently brought the disease with them, with devastating effects on the native population. Native Americans, whose ancestors had come to the New World some 10,000–30,000 years earlier, had never experienced smallpox and therefore had no natural immunity to it. In many areas, such as Mexico, only a fraction of the original native population would survive the smallpox plague.
There was no cure for smallpox once someone was infected, but for some time there had been knowledge of a preventative procedure. In Asia, particularly within the Ottoman Empire, some doctors utilized variolation a technique whereby the pus from a sore on a sick person was scratched into the skin of a healthy person. The healthy person would usually develop a mild case of smallpox and quickly recover, thereafter being forever immune from the disease. This practice was introduced into England in the early 18th century by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had observed it in Turkey while living there with her husband, the British ambassador to the Ottoman court from 1716 to 1718. Although most people considered the risk acceptable, death could result from variolation at about roughly one-tenth of the fatality rate from naturally acquired smallpox. Furthermore, a variolated person could still carry the disease and infect others. In 1796 Edward Jenner was inspired to look for a better method.
Jenner was born in Berkeley in 1749 and began to practice medicine there in 1773 after studying in London. On May 14, 1796, a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes came to Jenner with a small sore on her hand. He diagnosed her as having a minor variant of smallpox known as cowpox, which was not lethal. Jenner was also aware of the common English folk legend that milkmaids were immune to smallpox. He pressed some of the fluid out of Sarah's sore and, after she left, summoned his neighbor and her son. Jenner scratched some of the fluid from Sarah into eight-year-old Jimmy Phipps, who, over the next few days stayed perfectly healthy. Jenner began trying to infect the boy with some smallpox samples, but the boy never became sick: he had acquired an immunity from the cowpox scratching. After more tests on other patients, Jenner published the results of his new technique, which he called “vaccination” after vacca for “cow.”
News of Jenner's discovery spread across England and then Europe, and vaccination of the populace began. The Western world was eventually freed from smallpox, but the disease remained rampant in underdeveloped countries well into the 20th century because extreme poverty there meant that modern medicine was unavailable to the majority of the people. In 1967 the World Health Organization (WHO) began a worldwide vaccination program in order to wipe out smallpox, which was still causing approximately 2 million deaths every year. It was an enormously successful program, and the global incidence of smallpox dropped from over 10 million cases a year when the campaign began to zero by the end of the 1970s. After two years had passed without a single reported case, on May 8, 1980, the WHO declared that smallpox had been eradicated from the face of the earth.