Learn who Edward Jenner is. Discover the history of Edward Jenner and how he created the smallpox vaccine, and learn about the results of immunization.
Updated: 11/21/2023
Edward Jenner Biography | Smallpox History & Vaccination
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Frequently Asked Questions
How did Edward Jenner cure smallpox?
Edward Jenner did not cure smallpox. This happened much later, as the disease wasn't eradicated for almost another 200 years. However, he did develop the first vaccine for smallpox.
How did Edward Jenner discover the vaccine for smallpox?
Edward Jenner conducted the first vaccination experiment in 1796, by vaccinating an eight-year-old boy, James Phipps, with cowpox. Phipps was later found to be immune to smallpox.
What was Edward Jenner's theory?
Edward Jenner investigated the old wives' tale that dairymaids didn't contract smallpox because they'd already been exposed to cowpox. He wanted to understand why. His theory was that exposure to cowpox could result in protection from deadly smallpox strains.
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ShowEdward Jenner was an important scientist who was the first to scientifically test smallpox vaccination using cowpox material. He was born as the eighth in a family of nine children on the 17th of May, 1749. He was born in Gloucestershire. Both of his parents died in 1754. When he was 14, Edward Jenner apprenticed with the surgeon Daniel Ludlow for seven years and then continued to study medicine at St. George's Hospital in London under John Hunter. John Hunter was a renowned scientist and surgeon who quickly ascertained Edward Jenner's exceptional scientific abilities. The two remained lifelong friends.
At the age of 23, Edward Jenner returned to his hometown in Gloucestershire and hung out his shingle as a local doctor and surgeon. He married Catherine Kingscote on the 6th of March, 1788. After he came to prominence, he also had practices in London and Cheltenham, but he lived the rest of his life primarily in Gloucestershire. Throughout his life, Edward Jenner studied many types of science. An incomplete list can be found here:
- Biology, particularly the behavior and migration patterns of birds
- Geology
- Human histology
- Medicine, particularly vaccinations and general practice
Edward Jenner became interested in the old wives' tales of milkmaids being unable to contract smallpox due to his own experiences with the smallpox virus, which will be further detailed later in this lesson. Edward Jenner began his incredibly important research, which eventually led to the first truly scientific studies into smallpox and vaccination.
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Smallpox was a contagious disease caused by the variola virus, resulting in a fever and a progressive skin rash that caused small blisters. This disease plagued humanity for thousands of years, with some scientists estimating it emerged from Northern Africa approximately 10,000 years ago. Three out of every 10 people that contracted the illness died, for a fatality rate of approximately 30%. Communities that were struck simultaneously by smallpox and another concern, like famine, often had even higher rates of mortality. Children were particularly susceptible to this virus and had a higher mortality rate as well.
Smallpox played a major role in shaping human society. As explorers from Europe and Asia explored the New World in North America and South America, they inadvertently introduced the variola virus to the population. These populations had absolutely no prior immunity, and it decimated their population. The indigenous populations of Aztec and Inca peoples were almost completely wiped out by smallpox introduced by Spanish conquistadors and other explorers.
Thankfully, a vaccine was developed and completely eradicated smallpox from the face of the Earth. People are no longer vaccinated for smallpox because the disease doesn't exist outside of closely guarded laboratories. During the 1950s to the 1970s, the most successful vaccination campaign ever implemented occurred. The last naturally occurring outbreak in America happened in 1949. The last documented case of smallpox was in 1977, and it was declared truly eradicated in 1980.
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Early Immunity
The start of the 18th century saw approximately 300,000 European people dying from smallpox every single year. One in seven African children died of smallpox before reaching maturity. As a young boy, Edward Jenner was variolated for smallpox. Variolation was a common practice for children at the time. It involved purposefully exposing a child or adult to a mild form of smallpox so they would develop immunity to more serious and fatal strains. There were pros to this method, in that one became much less likely to die of smallpox. However, variolation resulted in lifelong negative health consequences. The negative lifelong consequences Edward Jenner experienced from variolation, paired with his keen scientific mind, led him to research smallpox.
What did Edward Jenner do about this problem? He decided to investigate old wives' tales that milkmaids didn't contract smallpox due to having previously contracted cowpox. His research discovered that many milkmaids contracted cowpox from contact with their cows' udders and other bodily fluids as part of their daily work. He discovered that it did indeed protect against smallpox. Cowpox is a very mild illness that results in uncomfortable sores but no other symptoms. It is a zoonotic virus, meaning it is transmissible between humans and animals. Scientists now know that cowpox and smallpox viruses are similar enough that antibodies developed for a cowpox infection also protected against future smallpox infections.
Edward Jenner decided to conduct a scientific experiment based on this information. On the 14th of May, 1796, Edward Jenner inoculated an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps. He scratched a cowpox blister into his skin. James Phipps contracted cowpox. On the 1st of July, 1796, Edward Jenner attempted to variolate James Phipps with mild smallpox matter, but no disease occurred. This was revolutionary because cowpox was so much less severe than variolation and clearly provided protection.
After a few years, doctors around the country switched from variolation to vaccinating with cowpox. This resulted in more positive outcomes for the children that were vaccinated in this way. The word vaccination is derived from this experiment, due to its excellent results and overall importance. Vacca is the Latin word for cow.
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After the initial vaccination test was proved successful, nobody volunteered to be vaccinated using cowpox. It took several years for doctors and surgeons around the country to believe this information was the truth. Edward Jenner was so impassioned that he built a small cottage in his back garden, providing vaccines to poor people free of charge. He called it the Temple of Vaccinia. His work was politically charged at the time, just as vaccinations are today. Some people believed him to be saving children worldwide (which he was), and others believed that he wanted to infect children with dirty diseases for no reason. This controversy continued for some time, but as evidence supporting Jenner's vaccination began to mount, doctors eventually began vaccinating with smallpox throughout the country.
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Smallpox was a contagious disease caused by the variola virus, resulting in a fever and a progressive skin rash characterized by blisters. Three out of every ten people that contracted the illness died, for a fatality rate of approximately 30%. Children were particularly susceptible to this virus and had a higher mortality rate as well. Edward Jenner was an important scientist who was the first to scientifically test smallpox vaccination using cowpox material. He decided to investigate the old wives' tale that milkmaids didn't contract smallpox due to having previously contracted cowpox. Cowpox is a very mild illness that results in uncomfortable sores but no other symptoms. Cowpox did protect against smallpox. Cowpox is a zoonotic virus, meaning it is transmissible between humans and animals. Scientists now know that cowpox and smallpox viruses are similar enough that antibodies developed for a cowpox infection also provided protection against future smallpox infections. The word vaccination is derived from this experiment, due to its excellent results and importance. Vacca is the Latin word for cow.
As is common with vaccinations today, Edward Jenner's work was considered controversial at the time. On the 14th of May, 1796, Edward Jenner inoculated an eight-year-old boy. His name was James Phipps. Jenner scratched a cowpox blister into his skin. James Phipps contracted cowpox. On the 1st of July, 1796, Edward Jenner attempted to variolate James Phipps with mild smallpox matter, but no disease occurred. This was revolutionary because cowpox was significantly less severe than variolation and clearly provided protection. However, after this experiment was successful, nobody wanted to participate in future experiments. As a result, Edward Jenner built a small cottage in his back garden, providing vaccines to poor people free of charge. He called it the Temple of Vaccinia. Smallpox was declared eradicated from the human population in 1980 after a very successful campaign of more modern vaccinations.
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Video Transcript
Smallpox
You may have heard of smallpox, but you probably don't know anyone who's had it. That's because, thanks to vaccination, smallpox has been eradicated from the world since 1980.
Smallpox is a deadly disease caused by the variola virus. It causes painful lesions that leave disfiguring scars on the skin of people who survive and can also cause blindness. However, many infected people do not survive. Smallpox had a fatality rate ranging from 20-60% in adults and even higher in infants.
History
Before its eradication, smallpox had been around for a very long time, probably since 10,000 B.C.! Smallpox epidemics played a role in the fall of some major human societies, including the Roman Empire and, after being carried to the New World by the Spanish conquistadors, the Aztec and Incan Empires.
Thanks to a remarkable vaccination campaign during the 1950s through the 1970s, smallpox was eradicated worldwide by 1980. Eradication means that the virus does not exist in the natural population anymore, and it is no longer necessary to try to prevent new infections.
Now the variola virus only exists in a few well-guarded laboratory stockpiles. Because it's no longer present in the human population and no longer vaccinated against, there are fears that the virus could be used as a biological weapon. World governments are thus taking precautions against possible smallpox epidemics.
Early Immunity to Smallpox
Since smallpox was historically such a major problem in human societies, people had always attempted to control the disease. As early as 430 B.C., people knew that if you survived a smallpox infection, you would be immune to the disease later on. That's why they asked smallpox survivors to nurse people suffering from the disease.
In the 1600s and 1700s, people began to use infectious material from smallpox patients to immunize uninfected people. They would take fluid from a patient's lesions and use a sharp instrument to introduce it under the skin of an uninfected person. This process was called inoculation, or variolation. While variolation could cause smallpox symptoms and transmit other diseases, such as syphilis and tuberculosis, people were still ten times less likely to die from variolation than from naturally transmitted smallpox.
It was also common knowledge that dairymaids were often immune to smallpox. This was because they were exposed to cowpox, a similar virus that affects cows. In humans, it causes a much milder version of smallpox. If the dairymaids got cowpox, they would be immune to smallpox afterwards, because the antibodies their bodies had made against the cowpox virus would also work against the smallpox virus.
Edward Jenner's Smallpox Vaccine
It was Edward Jenner (1749 - 1823) who put these pieces of information together and scientifically tested them. Jenner was a physician who was also very interested in various natural sciences, studying bird behavior, human blood, hydrogen and hot air balloons, and geology. His broad interest in the sciences led him to carry out the first scientific studies of immunity to smallpox.
In 1796, Jenner decided to test whether you could transmit cowpox to healthy people on purpose in order to immunize them against smallpox. He called this procedure vaccination from the Latin word vacca, which means 'cow.' Jenner tested vaccination on an 8-year old boy, and it worked! The boy didn't get smallpox when experimentally infected with it a couple of months later.
At first, Jenner's results were controversial in the medical community. Jenner tried to find more volunteers to further test vaccination, but no one was willing. However, thanks to a few other influential doctors who believed Jenner's study and further tested vaccination, by 1800 the practice was common in Europe and soon spread to the United States as well. Importantly, vaccination using cowpox was safer than variolation using smallpox, because if a cowpox infection developed, it was much milder than a smallpox infection. By 1840, variolation was prohibited in England because vaccination was so much safer.
Although Edward Jenner was not the first to discover that previous infection with smallpox or cowpox makes people immune to future smallpox infections, his contributions to the smallpox vaccine were major.
Results of Smallpox Vaccination
Jenner was the first to perform a scientific study to conclusively show that vaccination could be used to safely immunize people against smallpox. Many people consider Jenner's study to be the foundation of modern immunology.
Even though his work was met with a lot of criticism, resistance and even ridicule, Jenner relentlessly promoted vaccination and continued researching its effectiveness for years after his initial discovery. Edward Jenner was so devoted to the cause of vaccination that he set up a small cottage in his backyard where he vaccinated the poor for free.
Thanks to Jenner's research, it was possible for the World Health Organization's global smallpox vaccination campaign to completely eradicate smallpox from the Earth by 1980. This remarkable public health achievement has not yet been repeated for any other human disease.
Lesson Summary
In this lesson, we've learned that survivors of smallpox or cowpox became immune to future smallpox infections. Edward Jenner took the common wisdom that dairymaids were protected against smallpox by being exposed to cowpox and transformed it into scientific studies that led to the practice of vaccination. His research and promotion of vaccination made the global eradication of smallpox possible almost two centuries later.
Things to Remember About Smallpox
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- Smallpox - a deadly disease caused by the variola virus; there were fatality rates of 20%-60% in adults and higher in children
- Variola virus - causes painful lesions that leave disfiguring scars on the skin of people who survive and can also cause blindness
- Eradication - the virus does not exist in the natural population anymore; it is no longer necessary to try to prevent new infections
- Controlling the disease - survivors were found to be immune and asked to take care of patients who later contracted the disease
- Inoculation or variolation - infected patients had their lesions pricked with a needle, then the needle was placed under the skin of the uninfected
- Cowpox - a similar virus that affected cows
- Vaccination - a procedure developed by Edward Jenner, a physician familiar with smallpox and cowpox
- Scientific study - Jenner's work first to conclusively show that vaccination could be used to safely immunize people against smallpox
- World Health Organization - eradicated smallpox by 1980 through a worldwide vaccination campaign
Learning Outcomes
Complete this lesson on smallpox in an effort to:
- Remember the cause of smallpox
- Outline the history of the disease
- Discuss the attempts of early civilizations to immunize people against smallpox
- Describe the work of Edward Jenner
- Recognize the importance of vaccinations to medicine
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Edward Jenner Biography | Smallpox History & Vaccination
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