The inscription on the statue in Kensington Gardens, London, simply says “Jenner.” The sculptor obviously thought further details were unnecessary since, after all, just about everyone has heard the story of the English country doctor who discovered a way of protecting people against that most dreaded of diseases, smallpox. Well, as is so often the case with historical accounts, the story that people generally hear is incomplete. Edward Jenner deserves credit for his tireless effort to promote vaccination, but he was certainly not the first person to come up with the idea of inoculating people against smallpox with material taken from pustules on the skin of cowpox victims. An English gentleman farmer, Benjamin Jesty, inoculated his family with cowpox extract some twenty years before Jenner’s “discovery”!
Smallpox is a horrific disease that kills about 30 percent of its victims, leaving the rest scarred and often blind. As recently as the past century, it was responsible for more deaths than all wars combined. So it comes as no surprise that, throughout history, numerous attempts have been made to ward off this scourge. And one method, introduced in China in the tenth century, actually worked. That is, when it didn’t kill the recipient. Powdered scab taken from smallpox pustules was blown up the nose of people who desired to be protected against the disease. Those who didn’t come down with smallpox after this procedure were indeed protected for life. Word spread westward, and modifications to this process were introduced. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of Britain’s ambassador to Turkey in the eighteenth century, described how old women in Constantinople would scratch a vein in children and introduce an extract taken from someone who had suffered from smallpox. This made sense because, even at the time, it was understood that if someone survived smallpox, they would never get the disease again. So why not give the disease to the young and healthy who had the best chance of recovery? Indeed, by the early 1700s, healthy people in England were encouraged to be inoculated with matter taken from a patient sick with a mild attack of smallpox, but many were obviously reticent. The inoculation idea crossed the ocean as well. In the late 1760s, James Latham, a surgeon with the British military in Quebec, was inoculating both soldiers and civilians with the pox extract.
In 1774, an epidemic of smallpox struck the village of Yetminster, where Benjamin Jesty was a prosperous farmer. Knowing that about one in fifty people died from smallpox “variolation,” as the technique was known, he was unwilling to put his family at risk. He felt confident that a better form of protection against smallpox was available, and he thought he knew just what it was! Jesty, like many others at the time, had heard stories of people who avoided smallpox because they had previously been afflicted with a much milder disease, known as cowpox. This disease was endemic in some herds and could be transferred to people, especially milkmaids. Jesty himself had two milkmaids in his employ who, after having had cowpox, nursed relatives with smallpox without getting the disease. Impressed by this, the farmer took his wife and two sons out to a field where a herd of cows with symptoms of cowpox was grazing. Using a knitting needle, he scratched a lesion on a cow’s udder and transferred the material to a small incision he made on the elbow of his wife and sons. The three remained free of smallpox for the rest of their lives!
It is impossible to say whether or not Edward Jenner knew of Jesty’s ingenious idea, but being a physician, he was certainly aware of the inoculation process with live smallpox material. In fact it was his use of variolation that allowed Jenner to make his historic observation: some patients developed no reaction to the inoculation at all! When he questioned them, he learned that they had all previously had cowpox. That’s probably when Jenner recalled the words of his mentor, famed London surgeon Dr. John Hunter. “Why think? Why not try the experiment?” And so he did.
In 1796, an epidemic of cowpox broke out in Jenner’s village of Berkeley, and a young maid, Sarah Nelmes, consulted the doctor. She had fresh cowpox pustules on her hands, just the thing Jenner had been looking for. Amazingly, he obtained permission from the parents of eight-year-old James Phipps to try a risky procedure. He removed pus from a pustule on Sarah’s arm and injected it into the boy. James developed cowpox within a week, but recovered readily. Then Jenner inoculated Phipps repeatedly with pus from a smallpox patient and found the boy to be completely protected against the disease. He followed this experiment with several others and submitted a paper about his findings to the Royal Society of England. The manuscript was rejected because it was judged to be “incredible” and “in variance with established knowledge.” This forced Jenner to publish his results at his own expense in a small booklet in 1798. Within a year, vaccination, as the process was called, deriving from the Latin word for cow, was used on a wide basis, and in 1802, the British Parliament voted Jenner a grant of £10,000 in recognition of his “discovery.”
Benjamin Jesty was not a scientist and never sought publicity. Indeed, it was only when Jenner received his grant that the Reverend Andrew Bell, who knew about Jesty’s classic experiment, began to preach about the man “whose discovery of the efficacy of the cow pock against smallpox is so often forgotten by those who have heard of Dr. Jenner.” Without a doubt it was Jenner’s tireless promotion of vaccination and his numerous publications and letters to authorities that launched the massive inoculation procedures that led to one of humankind’s greatest achievements, the eradication of smallpox from the world. Had Jesty published his work, he would probably be sitting next to Jenner today in Kensington Gardens.