Jenner, Edward

(b. Berkely Gloucestershire, England, 17May 1749;d. Berkeley, 26 January 1823)

natural histroy, immunology, medicine.

Edward Jenner was the sixth and youngest child of the Reverend Stephen Jenner, rector of Rockhampton and vicar of Berkeley, a small market town in the Servern Valley. His mother was a daughter of the Reverend Henry Head, a former vicar of Berkeley. In addition to his church offices, Jenner’father owned a considerable amount of land in the vicinity of Berkeley.

In 1754, when Edward was five years old, both parents died within a few weeks of each other and he came under the guardianship of his elder brother, the Reverend Stephen Jenner, who had succeeded their father as rector of Rockhampton. Jenner’ first schooling was received from the Reverend Mr. Clissold at the nearby village of Wotton-under-Edge. Later he was sent to a grammar school at Cirencester. One of his favorite boyhood activities was searching for fossils among the oolite rocks of the countryside.

In 1761 Jenner was apprenticed to Daniel Ludlow, a surgeon of Sodbury, with whom he worked until 1770, when he went to London to study anatomy and surgery under John Hunter. Hunter had just taken over the large house of his brother William in Jermyn Street, and Jenner was one of Hunter’first boarding pupils. Jenner also served as Hunter’arranged the zoological specimens brought back by Joseph Banks from the first voyage of H. M. S. Endeavour. In 1773 Jenner returned to Berkeley, where he lived with his elder brother and began to practice medicine.

Jenner’s medical practice at Berkeley left him enough leisure time for activity in local medical societies, making observations in natural history, playing the flute, and now and then writing verse. His poetry has sometimes a simple beauty, his best poems being “Address to a Robin”and“The Signs of Rain“.

Hunter continually encouraged Jenner’s studies in natural history, for instance, by asking him to obtain particular specimens and to investigate temperatures of hibernating animals. Hunter incorporated many of Jenner’ observations in his own papers, published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and in his book Observations on . . . the Animal Oeconomy (London, 1786).

On 6 March 1788 Jenner married Katherine Kingscote and moved to Chantry Cottage, a comfortable Georgian country house at Berkeley, where he resided, except for intervals at London and Cheltenham, for the rest of his life. His wife, who bore him four children, died on 13 September 1815.

In 1786 Jenner wrote a paper on the breeding habits of the cuckoo and Hunter submitted it to the Royal Society. Jenner had shown that when a cuckoo’s egg, laid in the nest of another bird such as the hedge sparrow, was hatched, the eggs or nestlings of the foster parent were thrown out of the nest, apparently by their own parents. Jenner had no explanation for this seemingly unnatural behavior. The paper was read before the society on 29 March 1787 and was accepted for publication in the Philosophical Transaction. Then, on 18 June 1787, Jenner discovered that it was the newly hatched cuckoo which ejected from the nest of its“foster parent” the hedge sparrow’ own unhatched eggs and nestlings. Accordingly, Jenner withdrew his original paper before publication and revised it. On 27 December 1787 he sent the revised report to Hunter, and it was read before the Royal Society on 13 March 1788.

When Jenner began medical practice at Berkeley, he was frequently asked to inoculate persons against smallpox. Smallpox inoculation had been introduced into England early in the eighteenth century. A person in good health was inoculated with matter from smallpox pustules and was thus given what was usually a mild case of the disease in order to confer immunity against further smallpox infection. The practice was dangerous, however, since smallpox thus induced could be severe or fatal, and it tended to spread smallpox among the population

Such inoculation was evidently not a common practice in the English countryside until about 1768, when it was improved by Robert Sutton of Debenham, Suffolk. Sutton required the patient to rest and maintain a strict diet for two weeks before inoculation. He inoculated by taking, on the point of a lancet, a very small quantity of fluid from an unripe smallpox pustule and introducing it between the outer and inner layers of the skin of the upper arm without drawing blood. He used no bandage to cover the incision.

Jenner began to inoculate against smallpox using Sutton’s method, but he soon found some patients to be completely resistant to the disease. On inquiry he found that these patients had previously had cowpox, the disease which produced a characteristic eruption on the teats of milk cows and was frequently transmitted to people who milked the cows. Jenner also found that among milkmen and milkmaids it was generally believed that contraction of cowpox prevented subsequent susceptibility to smallpox, although there had apparently been instances where this had not been the case. His fellow medical practitioners in the countryside did not agree that cowpox prevented smallpox with certainty.

As early as 1780 Jenner learned that the eruptions on the teats of infected cows differed. All were called cowpox and all could be communicated to the hands of the milkers, but only one kind created a resistance to smallpox. He called this type “true cowpox.” Jenner subsequently found that even true cowpox conferred immunity against smallpox only when matter was taken from the cowpox pustules before they were too old (as had been the case with Sutten’s smallpox fluid). Jenner though (mistakenly) that true cowpox was identical with a disease of the feet of horses known as “grease,” and that the pox was carried from horses to cattle on the hands of milkmen who also cared for horse. He also believed at that time that the cowpox could be transmitted from person to person, serving to protect them from smallpox. But he was not able to confirm his opinions for another sixteen years.

On 14 May 1796 Jenner inoculated James Phipps, an eight-year-old boy, with matter taken from a pustule on the arm of Sarah Nelmes, a milkmaid suffering from cowpox. The boy contracted cowpox and recovered within a few days. On 1 July 1796 Jenner inoculated him with smallpox, but the inoculation produced no effect. In June 1798 Jenner published at his own expense a slender volume of seventy-five pages, An Inquiry Into the Cause and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae. In this work he described twenty-three cases in which cowpox had conferred a lasting immunity to smallpox. Jenner described “grease,”, the disease on the heels of horses, and suggested that it could cause cowpox in cows. He showed that cowpox was transmitted to the milkmaids, giving rise to pustules on their hands and arms but not to systemic disease. They recovered after a few days of mild illness and were thereafter immune to smallpox.

To describe the matter producing cowpox Jenner introduced the term “virus,” contending that the cowpox virus had to be acquired from the cow and that it gave permanent protection from smallpox. In Case IV of the Inquiry Jenner also describes a kind of reaction now known as aha- phylaxis. In 1791 one Mary Barge, who had had cowpox many years before, was inoculated with smallpox. A pale red inflammation appeared around the inoculation site and spread extensively, but it disappeared within a few days. Jenners noted how remarkable it was that the smallpox virus should produce such inflammation more rapidly than it could produce smallpox itself. He also observed that although cowpox gave immunity to smallpox, it did not confer similar immunity to the cowpox, itself.

Following the publication of Jenner’s book the practice of vaccination was adopted and spread with astonishing speed. It was taken up not only by medical practitioners but also by country gentlemen. clergymen, and schoolmasters. Jenner found that lymph taken from smallpox pustules might be dried in a glass tube or quill and kept for as long as three months without losing its effectiveness. The dried vaccine could thus be sent long distances. Jean de Carro, swiss physician living in Vienna, introduced vaccination on the continent of Europe and was instrumental in sending vaccine virus into Italy, Germany, Poland, and Turkey. In1801 Lord Elgin, British ambassador at Constantinople, sent vaccine virus received from de Carro overland to Bussora (Basra) on the Persian Gulf, and thence to Bombay. The marquis of Wellesley, governor general of India, actively pro- moted the distribution of the vaccine and many thousands of people were vaccinated in India during the next few years. In Massachusetts, Benjamin Waterhouse introduced vaccination to America with vaccine received from Jenner. Jenner also sent vaccine to President Jefferson, who vaccinated his family and his neighbors at Monticello.

After 1798 Jenner’s life was taken up almost entirely by the question of vaccination. He had to provide vaccine to those who requested it, explain the details of the procedure, and defend the practice against ill-informed criticism. He had to answer first the somewhat casual criticisms of Ingen-Housz and in 1799 the more serious attack of William Woodville, head of the London smallpox Hospital. Woodville had inadvertently inoculated his patients with small-pox when he attempted to vaccinate them, amis- fortune which produced serious cases of smallpox and at least one death. Jenner wrote a number of pamphlets in defense of vaccination. He was obliged to spend extended periods of time at London and to carry on a vast correspondence. In 1802 the British Parliament voted him a grant of £10,000 in recogni-tion of his discovery and in 1806 an additional grant of £20,000. In 1803 the Royal Jennerian Society was founded at London to promote vaccination and Jenner took a large part in its affairs; it was superseded in 1808 by a national vaccination program.

Although Great Britain and France were at war, in 1804 Napoleon had a medal struck in honor of Jenner’s discovery and in 1805 he made vaccination compulsory in the French army. At Jenner’s request he also released certain Englishmen who had been interned in France. In1813 the University of Oxford awarded Jenner an honorary M.D. degree.

After his wife’s death in 1815, Jenner rarely left Berkeley and never visited London. He resumed his studies in natural history and completed a paper on the migration of birds, published after his death, in which he showed that birds appeared to migrate into England in summer for the purpose of reproduction, and that the ovaries of the female and testes of the male were enlarged at that time. Jenner also served as a justice of the peace at Berkeley.

The day before his death he walked to a neighboring village, where he ordered that fuel be provided for certain poor families. In 1820 he had suffered a mild stroke, and on 25January 1823, a severe one. He died early the next morning.

Jenner’s discovery of vaccination made possible the immediate control of smallpox and the saving of untold lives. It also made possible, as Jenner realized, the ultimate eradication of smallpox as a disease, an end which is only now (1972) within sight for the whole world. Jenner must be considered the founder of immunology; in vaccination he made the first use of an attenuated virus for immunization. For his coining of the term “virus”his effort to describe the natural history of the cowpox virus, and his descript-tion of anaphylaxis, he must be considered the first pioneer of the modern science of virology.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A complete description of Jenner’ published work and a survey of sources concerning his life is provided in W. R. Lefanu, A Bio-Bibliography of Edward Jenner (London, 1951). All later biographical accounts of Jenner have been based on John Baron, The Life of EdwardJenner (London, 1827).

Jenner has also been the subject of criticism by anti-vaccinationists. E. M. Crookshank, History and Pathology of Vaccination, 2vols. (London, 1889); and Charles Creighton, Jenner and Vaccination (London, 1889), are writings of this order. There is no modern detailed biog-raphy of Jenner and his life awaits critical reexamination. The rapid development of immunobiology gives an ever- increasing historical interest to his work.

Leonard G. Wilson