English archive > Vaccination > Origin of vaccines

On 14th May 1796, an English doctor called Edward Jenner was the first to inoculate (which means to introduce into the body by means of a syringe) a vaccine against smallpox. The patient was an eight-year-old boy called James Phipps..

The doctor took some infectious fluid from the wound of a milkmaid who had caught cowpox when milking a cow.
Two weeks later, he again inoculated James with some pus he had taken from a smallpox patient. The boy never showed any signs of smallpox infection, and this proved that inoculating the germ - or, in other words, vaccinating - provokes a defence reaction by the body.

Jenner Jenner did not have an easy time: many doctors thought his idea was no good, but they were later silenced by his results.
Of course, vaccines have changed over the years. Their side-effects have been mitigated and their doses reduced, but the basic idea behind them has not changed a bit .

Jenner vaccinated the poor people in his town, Berkeley, and the surrounding district, free of charge. Many of those he vaccinated had been staunch opponents of vaccination, but the local vicar advised everyone to go and see the doctor because he was fed up with holding funerals for people who, if only they'd been vaccinated, would not have died of smallpox.

Nowadays, this vaccine is regarded as just another discovery, but you should know that in those days, some 15,000 people a year were dying of smallpox in France; in Germany over 70,000 people were affected, and in Russia, smallpox killed 2 million people in just one year.