Edward Jenner was an English physician and scientist who pioneered the concept of vaccines including creating the smallpox vaccine, the world’s first vaccine. The terms vaccine and vaccination are derived from Variolae vaccinae (smallpox of the cow), the term devised by Jenner to denote cowpox. He used it in 1798 in the long title of his Inquiry into the Variolae vaccinae known as the Cow Pox, in which he described the protective effect of cowpox against smallpox.
He still remembered the Bristol milkmaid’s remark and acquired the reputation of a bore because of his constant harping on cowpox and its preventive use. Eventually, and totally unethically, he took lymph from a pustule on the hand of a milkmaid and inoculated a healthy child, who developed cowpox in the normal fashion but proved immune to subsequent inoculation with smallpox. Both the medical profession and the Royal Society were hostile to these unorthodox practices so Jenner published his observations in 1798 and travelled to London to publicize them. His reception was so unenthusiastic that he returned to Gloucestershire leaving some lymph with Mr Cline, a surgeon at St Thomas’s Hospital. Cline used it to inoculate a child who also proved immune to a later attempt at smallpox inoculation and this popularized the practice.
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