EDWARD JENNER:
FATHER OF IMMUNOLOGY
English surgeon Edward Jenner combined field experimentation
with academic research to pioneer the process of smallpox
vaccination that led to the virus’s eventual eradication.
Towards the end of the 18th
century an English doctor by
the name of Edward Jenner
conducted an experiment on
an eight-year-old boy that
was to change the world. The
experiment had its critics.
The clergy said that Jenner’s work
was repulsive and ungodly, while
satirical cartoons appeared showing
humans sprouting cows’ heads. But
the advantages of using cowpox pus
to inoculate against smallpox – the
deadliest disease in human history
– soon became clear, and Jenner’s
pioneering work in the field became
the rock upon which the fight against
smallpox and other infectious human
diseases was built. While Jenner wasn’t
alone in realising that inoculation with
cowpox provided immunity to smallpox,
he was the first to publish proof of its
efficacy and to develop a reliable vaccine.
Today, the physician from Berkley in
Gloucester is known throughout the
world as the father of immunology.
Napoleon called Jenner “one of the
greatest benefactors of mankind.”
Born in the mid-18th century on 17th
May 1749, Jenner came into a world of
fundamental change, so much so that
Britain was just about to adopt the new
Gregorian calendar that corrected errors
in the former Julian calendar. It was
a time when British medical practice
and education was undergoing a quiet
revolution in which the old demarcation
between the Oxbridge physicians and
the more hands-on apothecaries was
becoming blurred. It was a time when
Written BY Nick smith
Edward Jenner 1749-1823
June 2020 / www.theengineer.co.uk 36
largely unchecked in other parts of the
world, notably Africa, well into the 20th
century, before intensive containment
measures and scientific surveillance
eventually led to its formal eradication
on 9th December 1979. Four decades on,
smallpox remains, in the words of World
Health Organization Director-General
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, “the only
human disease ever eradicated.”
The part Jenner was to play in this
eradication could not necessarily
be predicted from his conventional
background. The eighth of nine children,
his father was the vicar of Berkley,
which meant that he was destined for
a robust provincial education in both
Wooton-under-Edge and Cirencester.
By the age of 14 he had been inoculated
against smallpox by variolation and
he had left school, apprenticed to the
surgeon Daniel Ludlow for seven years,
and from whom he gained sufficient
experience to become a surgeon himself.
At the age of 21, Jenner undertook a
further apprenticeship in surgery and
anatomy at St George’s Hospital in
London. It was at this time that Jenner
fell under the influence of surgeon John
Hunter, who offered the young doctor
the characteristic Age of Enlightenment
advice: “don’t think; try.” With this
presumably still ringing in his ears in
1773, at the age of 24, Jenner returned to
his Gloucester home where he became a
practicing doctor and surgeon.
Meanwhile, English physician John
Frewster had discovered that prior
infection with cowpox rendered a person
immune to smallpox. Also, in the 1770s,
L ate, great engineers
practical experimentation and hospital work came to be
regarded as being on an equal footing with academic research.
It was also at time when the smallpox virus was killing 400,000
people per year in Europe. In Britain alone smallpox accounted
for the lives of ten percent of the population, with this figure
doubling in urban areas where infection spread more easily.
By Jenner’s time ‘variolation’ – treatment of a disease
with the same disease to create immunity to itself – was the
widespread method of addressing smallpox. While it had some
impact on reducing the effect of the virus, especially among
the wealthy, the process was fraught with risk, not least in that
those inoculated with the disease became carriers and could
infect those around them. It wasn’t until Jenner’s cowpox-based
vaccination became common practice by the end of the 19th
century that any significant reduction in incidence in Europe
and North America occur. Even then the disease remained
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org Edward Jenner. Oil painting.;
Mike Fouque/stock.adobe.com
/www.theengineer.co.uk