Jenner's centenary and his contribution to public health / [Edward Ford].

  • Ford, Edward (Edward Bruce)
Date:
[1949]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Jenner's centenary and his contribution to public health / [Edward Ford]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    sible for 10.3% of all deaths occurring in London, and in 1798, the year of the appearance of his work on vaccination, it caused 12% of the London deaths. All classes were affected and it entered the palaces as well as the homes of the poor. Some idea of the extent of the small-pox mortality before Jenner can perhaps be gained from a mention of some of its royal victims, though they could be expected to have whatever advantages were available. Two children of Charles I of England died of small¬ pox and three of James II, including Queen Mary (1694) the wife of William III. William Ill’s father and mother also died of small¬ pox, and like Queen Anne, he himself survived a serious attack. His contemporary Louis XIV of France also recovered from a severe attack, and his son the Dauphin, his grandson the Dauphin, and his great grandson Louis XV (1774) all died of it. In the Court of Austria the Emperor Joseph I (1711) died of small-pox, and two empresses, an Elector of Bavaria (1777), an Elector of Saxony and a ruler of Prussia (1767) Peter II, Emperor of Russia (1727) and the Queen of Sweden (1741) were also claimed by this disease. The historian Macaulay, who was born in 1800, two years after Tenner’s publication on vaccination, was stirred to the following description : “That disease over which science has since achieved a succes¬ sion of glorious and beneficial victories, was the most terrible of all the ministers of Death. The havoc of the plague had been far more rapid, but plague has reached our shores only once or twice within living memory, and small-pox was always with us, filling the churchyard with corpses, torment¬ ing with constant fear all those it had not stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its powers, turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, making the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden objects of horror to the lover.” Medical purists have demurred at some points in this passage. For example it has been disputed that residual pock scars were as frequent as is suggested. But it nevertheless reflects the feeling of pre-Jennerian writers. ■>* Prevention by Inoculation For about a century before the adoption of vaccination some protection from small-pox had been achieved in England by the use <ff an ancient Eastern practice of immunisation by the application •of material from a case of true small-pox. This was called inocula¬ tion or variolation. The former term was adopted by analogy with the grafting of trees, the transferred material in the latter being the buds or “eyes” — oculi.
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