Jenner and his impact on medical science : [lecture given at the bicentenary meeting held at the Royal College of Surgeons of England on May 17] / by Sir Edward Mellanby.

  • Edward Mellanby
Date:
[1949?]
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Jenner and his impact on medical science : [lecture given at the bicentenary meeting held at the Royal College of Surgeons of England on May 17] / by Sir Edward Mellanby. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Reprinted from the British Medical Journal May 28. 1949. vol. i. p. 921 .TENNER AND HIS IMPACT ON MEDICAL SCIENCE* BY Sir EDWARD MELLANBY, G.B.E., K.C.B., F.R.C.P., F.R.S. We are assembled here to-day to celebrate the life and work of Edward Jenner, who was born in Gloucester 200 years ago on May 17, 1749. We come to pay tribute to a man who discovered that vaccination protected against small¬ pox, and thereby placed in the hands of any community which cared to make proper use of it the means of eliminat¬ ing from their midst a deadly and disfiguring disease. The method was effective as Jenner presented it, and all the new knowledge and technical skill that have been added in the last 150 years have not changed its fundamental basis or added much to its efficiency. Apart from the value of vaccination in controlling or even eliminating smallpox, this discovery of Jenner’s has much wider significance. It was one of the earliest instances of preventive medicine and of the public control of disease. Its value on the scientific side of medicine is just as impos¬ ing, for Jennerian vaccination can be regarded as the parent of modern work on viruses and virus diseases and even of modern immunology. Indeed, it would be difficult to mention any discovery that has had a greater impact both on public health and on medical science, and it is but right that we should pay tribute to the man who was responsible for this important advance in knowledge. So much emphasis is nowadays placed on technique and statistical approval of investigations that it is well for us to take this opportunity of reminding ourselves that the first object of research is discovery, and that such discoveries may come not only from systematic and prolonged investi¬ gation, involving the use of standard methods with elaborate apparatus, but equally well from methods of observation and experiment of the simplest kind. Jenner himself was no professional research worker but a man with exceptional powers of observation and perception, who had also the outstanding quality, remarkable for this period and apparently innately developed, of appreciating the value of the experimental method. *Lecture given at the bicentenary meeting held at the Royal College of Surgeons of England on May 17. 264/49
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