Jenner and his impact on medical science : [lecture given at the bicentenary meeting held at the Royal College of Surgeons of England on May 17] / by Sir Edward Mellanby.

  • Mellanby, Edward, Sir, 1884-1955.
Date:
[1949?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Jenner and his impact on medical science : [lecture given at the bicentenary meeting held at the Royal College of Surgeons of England on May 17] / by Sir Edward Mellanby. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    script on the behaviour of young cuckoos through Hunter to the Royal Society. In this publication, it will be remem¬ bered, he showed that fledgling cuckoos heaved out of the unnatural nest in which they were born other fledglings and eggs, a murderous instinct they lost by the twelfth day after hatching.. It was not only Fellows of the Royal Society who found difficulty in believing this observation, and its complete acceptance had indeed to await the arrival of the cinematograph. However, a year later, in 1788, the work was published by the Royal Society in its Philosophical Transactions, and Jenner was elected to the Fellowship of the Society. While a medical student at Sodbury, Jenner heard the local traditional rumour that milkmaids who had suffered from cowpox never took smallpox. There is much evidence that he was not only intensely interested in this statement but that he brooded on it and studied the matter closely during the next twenty years. In 1796 he made the first vaccination—that of a boy—with lymph made from the vesicle on the hand of a milkmaid infected with cowpox. In 1797, when he was 47, he sent to the Royal Society for publication a record of his observations on the natural history of cowpox, and this was rejected. It is said that the refusal to publish this work was accompanied by an admonition that “ as he had gained some reputation by his former papers to the Royal Society, it was not advisable to publish this one, which would injure his established reputation.” The paper, revised and extended, was published by Jenner in 1798 as a private pamphlet with the title An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, a Disease discovered in some of the western counties of England, particularly Gloucestershire, and known by the name of the Cow Pox. Jenner lived in Gloucestershire as a busy country practitioner all his life, except for a short period in 1802, when he was tempted by the importunity and promises of his friends to become a specialist in London. This was a failure, financial and otherwise, and caused a return to his own countryside after three months. It must be added that Jenner did not retain the status of an apothe¬ cary, but in 1792 took the M.D. degree of St. Andrews University and did some consulting work in Cheltenham. From the time he published his paper on smallpox in 1798 Jenner, although living a secluded life in the country, was a notorious public figure, much applauded and much criticized. He spent most of the rest of his life vaccinating people and promoting vaccination as a preventive of smallpox. He died at the age of 74.