54 Vaccinations
Upon her return to England in 1713, Lady Mary lectured about the potential of ingrafting. She was dismissed as an untrained and “silly” woman. In early 1714 Caroline, Princess
of Wales, heard one of Lady Mary’s talks and approved Lady Mary’s ingrafting of convicts
and orphans.
Lady Mary collected the puss from smallpox blisters of sick patients and injected small
amounts of the deadly liquid into her test subjects. The death rate of those she inoculated
was less than one-third that of the general public, and five times as many of her subjects got
mild, non-scarring cases.
However, there was a problem with ingrafting. Inoculations with live smallpox viruses
were dangerous. Some patients died from the injections that were supposed to protect them.
Enter Edward Jenner, a young English surgeon, in 1794. Living in a rural community,
Jenner noticed that milkmaids almost never got smallpox. However, virtually all milkmaids
did get cowpox, a disease that caused mild blistering on their hands. Jenner theorized that
cowpox must be in the same family as smallpox and that getting mild cowpox was like ingrafting and made a person immune to the deadly smallpox.
He tested his theory by injecting 20 children with liquid taken from the blisters of a
milkmaid with cowpox. Each infected child got cowpox. Painful blisters formed on their
hands and arms, lasting several days.
Two months later, Jenner injected live smallpox into each of his test children. If Jenner’s theory was wrong, many of these children would die. However, none of his test children showed any sign of smallpox.
Jenner invented the word “vaccination” to describe his process when he announced his
results in 1798. Vacca is the Latin word for cow; vaccinia is Latin for cowpox.
Fun Facts: The World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated in 1979, and the President George H. Bush said that since then authorities have not detected a single natural case of the disease in the
world.
More to Explore
Asimov, Isaac. Asimov’s Chronology of Science and Discovery. New York: Harper &
Row, 1989.
Clark, Donald. Encyclopedia of Great Inventors and Discoveries. London: Marshall
Cavendish Books, 1993.
Dyson, James. A History of Great Inventions. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers,
2001.
Haven, Kendall, and Donna Clark. 100 Most Popular Scientists for Young Adults.
Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1999.
Vare, Ethlie Ann, and Greg Ptacek. Mothers of Invention. New York: William Morrow, 1989.
Yenne, Bill. 100 Inventions That Shaped World History. New York: Bluewood Books,
1993.