Edward Jenner Develops Smallpox Vaccination
- Date
- 14 May 1796
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- England, United Kingdom
- Era
- Early Modern
- Significance
On 14 May 1796, the English physician Edward Jenner performed a landmark experiment in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, that established the practice of vaccination.
Acting on the widely observed folk belief that milkmaids who had contracted the mild disease cowpox seemed immune to smallpox, Jenner inoculated eight-year-old James Phipps with material taken from a cowpox lesion on the hand of the dairymaid Sarah Nelmes, who had caught it from a cow named Blossom. When Jenner subsequently exposed the boy to smallpox through variolation on 1 July 1796 and he showed no infection, the protective principle was demonstrated. Jenner published his results in 1798 in An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, coining the term derived from the Latin vacca (cow). His method, far safer than the older practice of variolation, spread rapidly across Europe and the world and ultimately underpinned the global eradication of smallpox declared by the World Health Organization in 1980.
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Empires active in 14 May 1796
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Qing Dynasty1636 CE – 1912 CE
- Russian Empire1721 CE – 1917 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
- Mughal Empire1526 CE – 1857 CE
Related science, technology & invention events
- Watt patents the rotative steam engine1781
- Newton's Principia and universal gravitation1687
- Publication of Kaitai Shinsho, launching Rangaku in Japan1774
- Arkwright's Cromford Mill and the birth of the factory system1771 (water frame patented 1769)
- Sawai Jai Singh II builds the Jantar Mantar observatoriesc. 1724
- Variolation against smallpox reaches Europe1721
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Science
Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.
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