From Blindly Believing God to Scientific Reality
Edward Jenner: In the prehistoric and post historic days,
disease is considered as the curse of God for human’s sins. Human and animal
sacrifices are done to please the unknown and unseen God and prey for the
wellbeing of humans. One such fatal disease is small pox. For a very long time there was no cure for
small pox till the date when Edward Jenner discovered the first vaccine.
Vaccine is a real boon for medical advancement for the fatal disease like small
pox. Vaccine is a great invention in medical science and created history.
What Triggered Jemmer And How He discovered vaccination:
Edward Jenner after
finishing his apprentice and training in London at the age of 14,
came back to his native town Berkeley as a Doctor. When he was a practicing
doctor in his home town, small pox was rampant and killing many people every
day. But he was taken by surprise to observe that milk maids could not get
smallpox. He then concluded with his observations that even if milk maids get
small pox they only get a small version of it called cowpox which is not life
threatening. His deepened observations gave him a clue that a milk maid who
caught cowpox got blisters on her hands and Jenner concluded that the pus in
the blisters saved them from small pox.
Jenner decided to further
his experiments by injecting the pus he found on the hands of a milkmaid into
the body of a young boy in his village. The milk maid named Sarah developed the
blisters while milking her cow Blossom and the boy Jenner considered for his
experiment is James Phipps. He did the experiment with almost care slowly
increasing the dose of the pus into the target body. He then injected the small
pox itself into the body of Phipps and boy became ill and after few days
recovered completely without side effects.
A new era has started with his remarkable discovery the ‘vaccination’
As in many
scientific discoveries which will face tremendous criticism from other eminent
people in the field Jenner also faced lot of prejudice from medical eternity
from London. They did not accept his theory and severely humiliated However, they
could not deny his findings for and eventually his discovery had to be accepted
– a discovery that changed the medical history for better. Jenner's discovery
was so successful that the Government in 1840 declared his vaccine is the only
treatment for small pox and banned other treatments. The Government honoured
the trio, the boy ‘Phipps’, the milk maid ‘Sarah’ and the cow ‘Blossom’ by
naming the new discovery as ‘vaccination’
where ‘vacca’ means the cow in Latin
What is Vaccine and vaccinolgy?
Vaccine is creating
anti bodies from the infected and transmitting this anti body into the affected
person. Vaccine is great scientific breakthrough. He was neither the
first to suggest that infection with cowpox conferred specific immunity to
smallpox nor the first to attempt cowpox inoculation for this purpose.
Vaccinology is the study of
vaccine on immune systems and how these immune system respond to vaccines, but
also includes ongoing evaluation of immunization programs and vaccine safety
and effectiveness, as well as surveillance of the epidemiology of
vaccine-preventable diseases.
Other Surprising Information about Jenner:
Jenner is a writer and he wrote
his observation about cuckoos pushing the eggs and the young of its host out of
the nest so that the baby cuckoo was the only one to receive food from its
foster parents. This observation was later confirmed.
Jenner was born in the year 1749,
Gloucestershire, London.