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© Copyright 1997, Jim Loy
Edward Jenner saved millions of lives. Did he commit a crime, while doing this?
In the 18th Century, smallpox was a common and deadly disease. Nearly everyone caught smallpox. Some cases were severe, causing death or disfigurement. Other cases were mild. A person with a mild case became immuned, and could never again catch smallpox.
People were desperate. Some people intentionally exposed themselves to people with a mild case of smallpox, hoping that they too would get a mild case of the disease, and become immuned. The smallpox resulting from this was often not mild. In Turkey and China, some people took the liquid from the blisters of a person with a mild case of smallpox, and inoculated a person who did not have smallpox, hoping that this person would catch a mild case of smallpox. Such cases were often not mild.
Cowpox was a disease, much like a mild case of smallpox, which people caught from cattle. Edward Jenner had heard that people who caught cowpox, never caught smallpox. Jenner wondered if this were true. If it were true, people could be inoculated with the liquid from the blisters of cowpox victims, and become immuned to smallpox. He could save millions of lives.
How would you test this theory? Well, you would probably inoculate a large number of people, with cowpox liquids (which are rare). And you would have a similarly large number of people, which you would not inoculate, as a control group. And you would keep accurate records.
What Jenner did, in 1796, was to inoculate a little boy with liquid from the blisters of a woman with cowpox. The boy got cowpox. Two months later, Jenner inoculated the boy with liquid from the blisters of someone who had smallpox. Isn't this a little shaky, morally? The boy did not get smallpox. Jenner repeated this scary experiment again, two years later. He then published his findings, and became a world-wide hero.
Jenner named his inoculation process, "vaccination", because the Latin name for cowpox is "vaccinia" ("cow" is "vacca").
When Louis Pasteur (who explained the "germ theory" behind communicable diseases and immunity) inoculated sheep to protect them from anthrax, and when he inoculated people to protect them from rabies, he called the process "vaccination", in honor of Jenner.