The twilight of the Jenners / by Victor G. Plarr.

  • Plarr, Victor, 1863-1929.
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The twilight of the Jenners / by Victor G. Plarr. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    re-vaccinations performed by him in 1839. It is dated, Berkeley, 8th August, 1839, and is addressed to Mr. Gilham. At the head of the list of persons re-vaccinated comes the name of James Phipps, “ the first person vaccinated,” says Henry Jenners manuscript, “after the establishing of the practice This man was the Jenners’ gardener and specimen case. He was inoculated from vaccine obtained from the hand of a milkmaid, and was not re-vaccinated for thirty- seven years. Yet, says Henry Jenner : “He was by me several times inoculated for small-pox after the first vacci- nation, but could not be infected with it”. In 1843, in a pamphlet On the Proper Management of Vaccination, which is apparently based on the manuscript of 1839, he refers once more to this case, and speaks of inoculations “ with fresh-taken active small-pox matter,” which produced not the least con- stitutional effect. “ Phipps,” says Henry Jenner triumphantly, “ always enjoyed good health, and never since he was vacci- nated had a single day’s illness, and now, though aged, constantly and ably pursues his daily labour, as an under- gardener in our family.” Phipps, as a matter of fact, had been dangerously ill in 1818, presumably not of small-pox. So fanatic a believer in the protective powers of vaccination was Henry Jenner, that he seems repeatedly to have exposed his patients to variolous infection. Sometimes he inoculated with “fresh-taken active matter,” as in the case of the gardener. At others he took the vaccinated to visit the sick. His own children, William Henry and twin daughters, he treated with successive inoculations of small-pox matter, and subsequently took the boy “ into the room where a young- person lay in the most loathsome and dangerous state of small-pox. The sight frightened him, and with great difficulty I obliged him to go to the bedside and take hold of the poor sufferer’s hand, and the smell of the room was most intolerable, but he received no constitutional influence from the contagion.” On another occasion this St. Paul of Vaccination urges a wife to sleep for several nights in her infected husband’s bed. She had been vaccinated several years previously, and she con- sented. We may here remark that the poor of Berkeley