Edward Jenner

and Smallpox Vaccination

by Irmengarde Eberle

Washington D.C.

Reading Level

The Flesch Kincaid Reading Level Analysis produced a Grade Level of 7.3 for sample text.

Copyright

First Edition Published 1962 by Franklin Watts, Inc.

Second Edition Published by Ebooks for Students, Ltd. December, 2018.

All rights reserved to this electronic version. 

© Ebooks for Students, Ltd., 2018.

Washington, D.C.(202) 464-9126

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A Note from the Publisher

We are very happy to bring an affordable version of Jenner's fight against smallpox to readers. We found this book about a doctor and science surprisingly emotional as we read the last chapters. We found ourselves cheering for Jenner as he persisted with his observations and experiments year after year, and finally succeeded in spreading the word about how to safely inoculate against smallpox. His dedication saved millions of lives. His work led to a great decline in the threat of smallpox in the West in the 19th century. Elsewhere in the world, smallpox continued to kill in the 20th century. We are grateful to the writer and illustrator who did such an excellent job with the story of Edward Jenner and smallpox.

ONE

Always to Be Remembered

On a May afternoon in 1755, Stephen Jenner, the vicar of Berkeley, in England, was preparing to call on some of his parishioners. The sky was overcast, but now and then the sun came out. The weather was pleasantly mild.

Knowing how much his five-year-old brother Edward enjoyed such trips, he looked about for him, and called.

Edward was Stephen’s youngest brother. He, together with his mother, had come to live with the young vicar and his wife Eleanor some months ago, after the death of the boys’ father.

Once the older Jenner had been vicar here, and now his eldest son Stephen had followed in his footsteps. Both were clergymen of the Church of England.

The two Jenner brothers, one a grown man, the other a young child, were very good friends. They set out together now in the vicar’s carriage. The two bay horses stepped along in lively fashion.

The small boy chattered about whatever he saw in the broad stretches of fertile valley of this English county of Gloucestershire. The Severn River flowed through it, and now and then they drove along its bank for a while, or saw glimpses of it through the trees.

The grass was bright green, now in May, and the hawthorn bushes along the lanes were white with blossoms. To Edward, everything in the valley was beautiful. He turned his eyes this way and that, in order not to miss anything. The road wound past well-kept farms. Cows grazed in the meadows, for this was dairy country. The Jenners came to a farmhouse, and the vicar stopped the horses. While he went indoors to visit an old woman and bring her his encouragement and sympathy, Edward walked about the grounds and around to the back of the house. There a milkmaid was resting in the shade of a tree. The boy looked into a door and saw some of the great “double glauster” cheeses the farmers made, for which the region was famous. He went to the milking sheds. The old woman’s grown son was there, repairing a wall, and Edward talked with him. Then the vicar called and the small boy ran back to the carriage.

They stopped at another farm and then, some miles farther on, called on some people who, like themselves, were the landowners and well-to-do residents of the region. Stephen and Edward came from a very old family of Gloucestershire and nearby Worcester, and had many friends and relatives in the area.

Toward evening the Reverend Stephen Jenner turned his horses homeward. From a hill, the brothers could see almost all the Berkeley Valley. How gentle the rich land looked. How pleasant it was to see the neat little farms. There was almost no real poverty here. In his earnest, thoughtful way the vicar talked to his little brother about this good land.

And he said, “We who live here are fortunate.”

The happiness the child had felt all afternoon grew larger in his heart.

Arriving at their house again, Edward ran upstairs to see his mother and tell her about the afternoon’s events. She had become an invalid since the death of her husband, and kept almost entirely to her room. But Edward had quickly adjusted himself to the change in his life. He was so young that he soon forgot the earlier part of his boyhood entirely. He was completely happy here. Stephen and his wife Eleanor were good to him. They had no children of their own, and they treated him like a son and loved him dearly.

A strong, healthy child, Edward was nevertheless gentle by nature. He learned easily when his brother gave him lessons in reading, writing, arithmetic, and history. He loved music and before long was taught to play the violin. As soon as he could play a tune, Eleanor accompanied him on the harpsichord.

Here at Stephen and Eleanor’s the open country lay nearby, and Edward could enjoy the green meadows and patches of woodland by himself. There were children to play with, and he liked companionship.

Southeast of the village of Berkeley, on the bank of the Severn, stood a great castle where the Earl of Berkeley lived. On its lawns and in its well-kept woods, Edward often played with the children of the earl’s family or friends.

Here, and in the woods and meadows, he saw small dormice, chestnut-colored little animals the size of house mice. He was interested in them and especially in the nests they made in the branches of bushes and trees. By the time he was eight he owned a small collection of these dormouse nests, which he kept in his room.

Edward had not suffered a day of illness as a baby or since Stephen and Eleanor had taken him into their home. But in those days people always feared that their children might catch smallpox. They feared with good reason, for almost everyone had the disease sooner or later. Smallpox was a terrible scourge and a constant danger all over Europe and Asia, and it had already been carried to the new colonies in America by explorers, adventurers, and colonists. Almost every adult person in England had the ugly scars of it on his face and body. Thousands were blinded or became insane as the result of particularly bad cases of the disease, and many more thousands died of it each year.

There was no cure for it. The only protection there was against smallpox—and it was only a partial protection—was a form of inoculation that had been introduced into England from Asia by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu some years before. The inoculation was still not widely believed in, but was in use to some extent. The College of Physicians in London had only recently given it their approval. In this treatment the pus from a pustule of a mild case of smallpox was scratched into the veins of a healthy person in several places on his body. This procedure usually gave the person only a light case of the disease, and the inoculation made him safe from a worse attack. Doctors didn’t know why, but this treatment did work to some extent. And since only a small percentage of those treated became dangerously ill from the inoculations, some people were glad to risk them.

There was also danger involved for others of the community, however. The inoculated persons infected others with whom they came in contact, and so spread the disease. Some of those infected became fatal cases. To avoid this, the doctors had “inoculation stables.” Here they kept patients for some weeks, while they put them through the treatment.

Eleanor, who had become as fond of small Edward as her husband was, worried about the boy’s catching smallpox. She knew the inoculation was roughly performed and could cause a person a good deal of suffering. Still, she believed Edward would be safer with it than without.

Edward was therefore put in the care of the family doctor. As was the custom at the time, the physician began a strenuous six weeks of treatment, to prepare the little boy for the inoculation. He bled Edward regularly, for that was supposed to make his blood fine. He put the boy on a low diet, on which the child felt half-starved and grew very thin. He dosed him for weeks with a sweet liquid designed to enrich his blood. The doctor wanted to have the boy in good shape, so that he could stand the inoculation better. But the result was just the opposite. By the time the treatment was to be given, Edward was weak and badly run-down.

This was misery enough, but now Edward must also be removed from his comfortable home and the loving care of Eleanor, Stephen, his mother, and the attentive servants.

Eleanor packed a few clothes for him and drove him to the doctor’s, where Edward was given the inoculation. Then Eleanor was told that she must leave immediately so that she would not be infected.

The little boy was taken to a big room and tied with a rope, so that he could walk but a few steps. He went as close to the door as the rope allowed, and from there watched his dear sister-in-law drive away. She waved to him several times, then she was out of sight beyond a slight hill. Edward felt deserted.

He turned away and for the first time really looked at the place he was in. Fear rose in him and grew almost to panic. The long shed stood in bare grounds. The dozen or more other children in the room with him were mostly as young as he, or younger, and they were either crying or sitting about with their distress plainly written on their faces.

Two boys who had been inoculated some days earlier were lying on their straw pallets tossing, turning, and groaning. Their inoculations were already taking effect, and they were feverish.

“Mama,” the smaller boy kept calling. “Mama.”

Edward wanted to cry, but controlled himself. He knew he could do nothing for the sick boys, and he could not bear to watch their misery. Again he walked as close to the door as his rope would let him, and there waited the day out. When evening came, a dirty caretaker brought supper to all the patients. It was poor, coarse food, served on heavy dishes. Hungry as Edward was, he could hardly eat.

He lay down on his lumpy pallet that night with the whimpering of the sick boys in his ears. It was a long time before he fell asleep.

The days dragged by. Some of the patients recovered and left. One, who had suffered a serious case of smallpox from the inoculation, almost died. In a little over a week Edward came down with the expected light case of smallpox—but it was not really very light. He was too run-down to bear it well, and he became very ill. No one looked after him except in the roughest, most careless way. He lay suffering. Sometimes he was too sick to know where he was, and he lived in a nightmare world.

The days passed and he began to get a little better. But he was very weak and there were strange sounds in his ears.

At last, one day when he was sitting hopelessly on a bench hardly even thinking, he was called by the doctor. As he came shakily to the door of the shed, he saw Eleanor and Stephen near the gate and went to them.

Eleanor was shocked at his appearance. Tears came to her eyes.

Stephen put an arm around the boy and told him gently that they were taking him home. He too was alarmed at his small brother’s frailty.

Edward was never able to tell them just how terrible the inoculation had been. It was an experience he never forgot. The whole harmful process of preparing him, and the dreadful weeks at the doctor’s, had changed him from a strong, healthy boy into a very sickly one. It took him many years to outgrow even partly the ill effects of the treatment. The nerve-racking sounds in his ears troubled him until he was a grown man.

It seems certain that his own suffering from the inoculation had something to do with the intense interest he had as an adult in finding a better way to protect people against smallpox. But that was not the only reason for his concern. The sight of what the disease itself did to people all around him—the way it killed, marred, blinded so many—touched his heart even more deeply.

Naturally he did not think about all this very fully when he was still a small boy. But the impressions, the memories, were there in his mind.

Now, eight-year-old Edward took up life again at home in Berkeley, but some of the joy had gone out of it.

Because he was so sickly, his brother went on teaching him for a year or more instead of sending him to school. Edward was intelligent and alert, and his older brother did not find it hard to give him his lessons. But the boy was of an age when he needed real schooling, so after a while Stephen sent him to a small school for young boys, run by the Reverend Dr. Clissold at Wotton-under-Edge.

Edward got along well there. The man was gentle and kind, and the few other young students were good company. But Edward was still in such poor health that after six months Stephen took him home again, wondering if the boy would ever really be strong.

TWO

The Schoolmaster He Did Not Like

As time went on, Stephen became concerned about the boy’s future. What career did he wish to prepare for?

Edward was uncertain. He liked the outdoors. All nature interested him, but he did not think he could make a living as a naturalist.

Stephen suggested that he might become a clergyman, but Edward was not at all sure. His mother was determined, however. She wished the boy to follow in the steps of his father and his two older brothers.

Edward said nothing, but he began to think that this was probably the only career open to him. What else could he do?

After the summer holidays Stephen took him to Cirencester to the school of another scholarly clergyman. Dr. Charles Washbourn. This was no such friendly and homey place as the Reverend Dr. Clissold’s school had been.

Dr. Washbourn, a tall, thin-faced man, was narrowminded and he believed in sharp discipline. He used a cane not only to punish the students for every small and large disobedience, or for laziness, or for the thoughtless breaking of a rule, but also to pound the lessons in. The boy who could not memorize a lesson fully, the boy who seemed less mentally alert than the master wished, would get a whipping. And so would the boy who asked questions. Dr. Washbourn always kept a cane lying on the side of his desk.

The students were taught religion, a little history, and Greek and Latin. Edward was a bright student and learned easily, but he asked questions in class. He asked more questions than any other boy, and his habit angered the headmaster greatly.

The first time it happened, Dr. Washbourn said, “Master Edward, I would advise you not to question what men wiser than you say or have written down for boys to learn.”

Edward was puzzled and confused. At home and at Dr. Clissold’s he had always been allowed to ask questions. In fact, his grown-up brother, Stephen, had encouraged him to do this, saying that a good mind questioned what it did not understand, and looked for a sound answer.

Doesn’t Dr. Washbourn want me to use my mind? Edward wondered. It didn’t seem so. The man expected the students only to memorize.

Edward was not very comfortable with Dr. Washbourn, but he did like the boys. He had never had quite so many boys to play with. He was a pleasant lad and liked companionship. As he stayed on at the school during the years when he was nine, ten, and eleven, he made many friends.

He still felt the aftereffects of his inoculation—especially the whistling in his ears. Nevertheless, he got along well enough in his classes, and in his free time he enjoyed himself. His interest in natural science grew stronger.

Often, with a half-dozen other boys, he roamed the surrounding hills and valleys, meadows and woods. Sometimes, after playing with the other boys for a while, he wandered off by himself, looking for things that interested him especially.

He collected birds’ nests, dormouse nests, insects, and seeds and bits of plants. He liked to look at the different rock outcroppings, too. One day he found, in the sandstone and shale on a low hill, some fossils of sea animals, and he guessed that this land must have been under water in some far-distant past. He was fascinated with his find. Carefully he dug and pried some of the fossils out, and took them to his room. All the many things he collected, he carefully sorted and mounted on cardboard or stiff paper, or put in small boxes, labeling and cataloging them as an adult scientist would.

He searched for books on plants and animals. He wrote to Stephen, asking for some books on natural science, and read and read. In this way he found out about Linnaeus, the Swedish doctor who had started the important work of classifying all plants and animals. Linnaeus gave each kind of plant or animal a double name, one for the genus to which it belonged, and one for the species within the genus. English natural scientists admired Linnaeus greatly, and had even formed a society named after him. Edward saw how valuable Linnaeus’s system of classifying was. It brought order and sense into the study of living things. Edward began to classify his own specimens as best he could, and he became good at it.

He found, unfortunately, that Dr. Washbourn was not at all interested in natural science. He rebuked Edward for spending time and thought on it. He said that it was a waste of time to read on the subject, and that collecting and examining plants and rocks and watching the ways of animals was stupid and dirty. He also called such an occupation unsuitable for one who intended studying for the ministry.

But Edward was too interested—he could not let Dr. Washbourn stop him. He bought more books with his own spending money. And he found one that told him about the first great men of medicine in ancient times: Hippocrates, Galen, and others. He read of how the great Greek scholar Hippocrates, in the fifth century B.C., had tried to rid the study of medicine of superstition and ignorance and to start accurate observation of nature’s processes. Hippocrates was thoughtful of others, and ethical. Edward read his famous words, which have since become the Hippocratic oath taken by all doctors. The boy was stirred by the mind and character of this early great man.

Edward also read about recent discoveries in science. He became particularly interested in William Harvey, the English doctor who had discovered the circulation of the blood. These things he found in books excited Edward and made life seem more important and worth while.

When Dr. Washbourn found that the boy was continuing his scientific reading, he was angry. He called Edward to his office and had an earnest talk with him.

“You are letting your mind dwell on dangerous thoughts and ideas, Edward,” he said. “Let me remind you that science is often in direct contradiction to religion, and therefore had best be left alone. You will offend God with your foolish reading.”

Edward was amazed. He did not feel that he was offending God by honest reading and thinking. He could not give up his reading, or his study of nature. Nor could he stop asking questions, for he was too eager to know more. The questions seemed to pop out by themselves. But after the talk with Dr. Washbourn he tried to hold them back, since the minister objected to them. Often he went back to his books instead, and tried to find answers. Dr. Washbourn, he realized, certainly was not going to help him develop his mind in a scientific direction.

When Edward was about twelve years old he was in class one morning, listening to Dr. Washbourn speak. The minister was talking about the meaning of God. He said that human beings could not understand all the workings of God, and must accept blindly that whatever happened was God’s will. They must never question the word of God as stated in the Bible.

Edward was becoming more and more disturbed at the idea that one must not question and try to find out more.

Dr. Washbourn quoted a few verses of the Bible, which told of how the Lord let hordes of locusts descend on His people. And the doctor pointed this out as an example of one of the mysteries of God’s works. He said, “No one knows what makes locusts multiply into hordes. It happens through the will of God.”

At this point young Edward could no longer hold himself in. He arose. “But Dr. Washbourn,” he said, very earnest and excited, “that is not a mystery. Naturalists who have studied insects know how they multiply.”

The minister’s face grew purple. “Are you aware that you are contradicting me?” he asked furiously.

“I—well, sir,” Edward said nervously, “I was just telling you what I have read, and what naturalists have established as a fact. It was because of that great man in Holland, Leeuwenhoek. He made microscopes, glasses that magnified hundreds of times. Since then, naturalists have studied the insects with these glasses, and now they know that they lay eggs, and that the new insects hatch from these.”

“Enough!” Dr. Washbourn almost shouted. He reached for his cane.

Edward was horrified. Would he be beaten again in punishment? And punishment for what? For telling truths, facts? This his good, forthright mind would not accept. Shock as well as panic overcame him, and he rushed to the door, down the hall, and out of the building.

Once outside, he began to realize that he had only made things worse for himself. Now the headmaster would really thrash him. He decided that he must get away from here, entirely and forever. He ran on. Behind him he heard Dr. Washbourn shouting to him from the school building, and he ran faster. He knew the road that led to his home, many miles away, and he went in that direction. He walked all day. It was evening when he arrived in Berkeley.

Eleanor and Stephen were, of course, surprised to see him. And when they heard his story they were not at all sure what they should do. One thing was certain: they could not encourage him in running away from school. But the intelligent, fair-minded Stephen decided to take Edward back himself, and find out what the trouble was. The boy, of course, was afraid of a thrashing.

After giving Edward a few days’ rest, Stephen drove him back to the school. While the boy waited outside, his older brother had a talk with Dr. Washbourn. He came out after a while, looking upset. He had asked Dr. Washbourn about some of his ideas on education and religion, and especially about a boy’s asking intelligent questions and searching for knowledge in many books. He had found the headmaster too narrow-minded even for an earnest minister like himself. He objected to the man’s stifling the healthy curiosity of a child. And he knew, too, that Edward would remain in constant trouble with the man. So he took the boy out of school. He and Edward packed up the boy’s clothes and books, and his natural-history collections, and returned home.

Edward was happy, and grateful to his understanding big brother.

There followed many months of quiet study and play for Edward at his home in Berkeley. Stephen set him lessons in history and the classical languages. Eleanor helped him with his music, teaching him to read it better. And she accompanied him as he practiced on his violin. He loved poetry, too, and read all he could find.

As always, he enjoyed his native fields and woods, and watched the birds and small, furry animals. Often friends went with him on his field expeditions.

He continued to read everything he could find about medicine and surgery. Of all his interests this one was becoming the strongest.

A year passed and Edward was thirteen, and a boy of good size. One day his brother asked him again whether he wanted to become a minister when he grew up. Now Edward knew the answer clearly. He replied that he wished to become a physician and surgeon.

Stephen was not surprised.

“Very good,” he said simply. “Then we shall find a place where you may study toward that goal.”

THREE

The Beginning of a Career

In the middle 1700’s, when Edward Jenner was a boy, physicians and surgeons knew very little about the human body and its ills. For ages past, a few brilliant men of Europe had tried to gain real knowledge, but medical progress was slow. It was not known that germs, bacteria, and viruses caused diseases. Without this knowledge, men could not find out how to prevent illnesses, or how to cure people once they had them. Little was known about anatomy, though many men were searching, trying to learn more about the human body. William Harvey’s newly gained knowledge of the circulation of the blood was the greatest medical discovery of the time—the greatest advance of the day.

Doctors knew of certain roots, herbs, and drugs from which they prepared medicines. About the only remedies that served a useful purpose were their purges, and their pills to reduce pain. Doctors bled patients, in the mistaken idea that this improved their health.

Doctors were able to set breaks in bones, and they could stitch up slashes or cuts. They bound up sprained ankles, and removed dust or coal particles from the eyes of sufferers. In case of a serious disease, for which doctors usually knew of no cure or even help, they at least saw to it that the sick person was properly cared for, so that he would be better able to throw off the illness. Insisting on proper care was important, for ignorance, superstition, and lack of cleanliness were common among both rich and poor.

In the early part of the seventeenth century almost anyone who wanted to could set himself up as a doctor, no matter how ignorant he was. Some of the physicians, however, were good and serious men who really tried to learn all that could be known of anatomy and medicine, and who used their minds well. They regretted that there were many quacks in the medical profession.

Finally the more intelligent and responsible doctors organized themselves. They demanded that a man wishing to be a physician must study with a well-known doctor or in one of the few hospitals. When a committee of doctors judged that he was fit for the profession, he was given a license to practice. He then had the right to call himself Doctor. In this way, physicians hoped to raise the standards of their profession, and to keep out the ignorant and the careless.

The case with surgeons was somewhat different. For a long time they continued to practice without a license. These men were not allowed to call themselves Doctor. They were simply called Mister, though they treated patients and performed operations. Earlier, they had been called barber-surgeons. Because barbers had training in using sharp blades skillfully, they had at first been called in to bleed the sick. Out of this practice grew a group of men who became more interested in the medical and surgical end of their work than in the barbering. They became the surgeons of that day, but the name barber remained a part of their title for many years.

In 1745 they went before Parliament and asked to be allowed to separate themselves from the barbers entirely, and to drop that part of their title. Permission was given, and the men organized themselves into the Royal College of Surgeons. Through this organization they shared the knowledge they gained in their private practice and in the few hospitals. They studied and compared their findings. They worked side by side with the physicians in the hospitals in the big cities.

Good physicians and surgeons tried hard to cure the sick, but they could not become fully useful until they learned more about human anatomy. They needed human corpses to dissect and study. For some decades it had been a hard struggle for them to get these bodies. The church was against dissection, and so was the public. Because the law forbade dissection, surgeons and their students had to get bodies in any way they could—a difficult and often unpleasant business. Yet they persisted, for they realized that without better knowledge of the human anatomy, the practice of medicine could not advance.

Finally the government made it legal for surgeons to obtain a few corpses for dissection. A surgeon was allowed to send a man with a sack or cart to the scaffold on a day when a criminal was to be hanged, and to take the body away. This practice did not provide enough bodies for all the surgeons and students, however. They were willing to pay to get more cadavers, and there were rough, coarse men who, for a price, supplied the need. They robbed graves.

The more famous surgeons of the large city of London had many students who watched and listened while the surgeon dissected and lectured. The students themselves had to have corpses to dissect. More cadavers were needed, and consequently more were bought from the grave robbers.

In the small towns, young men often studied with established surgeons who had dissected bodies and knew something of anatomy. But a student still might enter medical and surgical practice without direct knowledge of anatomy through the personal experience of dissecting.

Over all, men were slowly beginning to learn. The intricacies of the human body are difficult to understand, and sometimes men came to wrong conclusions, sometimes to right ones. It was an age of experimentation. There was trial and error, and also discovery and growth, in the medical profession. Men with exceptional minds, and especially those with a definite scientific bent, were much needed.

Edward Jenner was thirteen when he made the decision to become a surgeon, and already he had the qualities that make a good one. He had the mental attitude, the approach, of a scientist. His scientific leanings had shown themselves in his nature observations and his reading.

After Edward had told his brother what career he wanted, Stephen turned the matter over in his mind for some days. He must find a local surgeon or physician with whom Edward could study. He thought of Daniel Ludlow in the town of Sodbury, near Bristol—a man he had long known. Because this man had studied in London, he was better prepared in his profession than most local surgeons.

Stephen wrote to Daniel Ludlow, and soon received a reply. Ludlow said that he was much interested in Edward, and invited Stephen and his young brother to come and see him.

Sodbury was not far from Berkeley, and one rainy day the two Jenners took the coach to call on Ludlow. The surgeon greeted them warmly and, after a brief chat, led them to his apothecary shop and waiting room, on the ground floor of his house. The shop’s walls were of dark wood, and the gray light from the window did little to brighten the room. Containers of herbs and powders, which Daniel Ludlow used in concocting the medicines he prescribed for his patients, stood on the shelves against two walls. Against the third stood a cabinet containing a few small, shining surgical instruments.

Edward was fascinated with the place. He breathed deeply of the air, which was tinged with the smell of medicines. He stood long before the cabinet, gazing at the surgical instruments and imagining how they were used.

Mr. Ludlow watched Edward, and there was a pleased look on the man’s face. He liked the boy, and thought he would make a likely apprentice.

Daniel Ludlow and Stephen talked about the matter in more detail. Mr. Ludlow was a bachelor, and his household was run by an elderly housekeeper who had been with him for some time. The surgeon offered to take the boy into his house and provide him with a room and board while he worked and studied. This arrangement satisfied Stephen. It was agreed that the boy was to come to Mr. Ludlow in midwinter, a few months later.

In the meantime, Edward continued studying his lessons with Stephen. He read literature, especially poetry, for pleasure, and he continued to enjoy his violin. On fine days he sometimes walked over to see his aunt, Mrs. Hooper, who lived at Clayton, five miles away. And, as always, he saw much of his friends, boys and girls of the well-to-do families of the farms and the village. It was a quiet life, but a good one, and Edward loved it.

In January, 1763, Stephen again took Edward to Daniel Ludlow’s home, together with a chest full of his clothes, and his violin. This time he left the boy there.

Edward felt strange in the house of this man whom he knew only slightly. He did not think he would like Sodbury as well as his village of Berkeley. He was homesick.

At lunch the first day he was quiet, and the surgeon did not know how to put him at his ease. When they had finished eating, Mr. Ludlow got up and started out of the room, with a word to Edward to follow.

They went through the small waiting room, where several patients were already sitting. Edward watched the surgeon as he took care of these sick people, one by one. There was a man with a bad cut on his leg. Mr. Ludlow washed the wound, then took a number of stitches to close it. Edward was amazed at the ease, the precision, and the speed with which the surgeon worked. Another patient, a young girl, had a carbuncle. The surgeon took an instrument he called a lancet, and sliced it open. He cleaned it and put an ointment on it, and assured the girl that now it would heal. Another woman had a fever, and after examining her the surgeon shook his head. He said he was not sure of the cause. He took powders from several jars and put them into a round wooden bowl called a mortar. With a pestle he ground them up and mixed them, and so made a medicine, which he gave her.

When she had left, he remarked sadly to Edward on the many diseases about which neither physicians nor surgeons knew a great deal. So much needed to be found out in medicine and surgery, he lamented.

By now, Edward had entirely forgotten his homesickness and loneliness, and was completely absorbed in what he saw and heard. This was the place where he wanted to be—he was sure of that.

From then on, his days were always full, and each day was more interesting than the preceding one. At first, he merely listened and watched while Mr. Ludlow talked to the patients about their ills, and treated them. But he made himself useful in small ways: sweeping and dusting the office, and seeing that the medicine jars were all in their places. He ran errands for the surgeon, too.

Mr. Ludlow talked to him about his cases, and about medical theories concerning diseases. He explained bone breaks and injuries of many kinds to Edward. He told the boy what medicines a surgeon had to work with, and how they were supposed to help. He taught Edward how to grind and mix roots, herbs, and drugs to make the medicines. The boy quickly became expert at the work. Mr. Ludlow was an excellent teacher and enjoyed his pupil.

In Mr. Ludlow’s house, there was a small, but good library, containing some of the best medical books of the day. Edward read these with intense interest. In some there were drawings showing the internal organs of the human body as physicians of the time thought them to be. These drawings were, of course, limited and still imperfect, but they were of great help. Mr. Ludlow also had an anatomical drawing on his apothecary wall. It was a copy based on the wonderful anatomical studies of Albrecht von Haller, of the continent. Edward studied these books and pictures daily.

The surgeon dissected dead animals so that he and Edward might study them. From the bodies of animals such as rabbits, field mice, and rats one could learn much that was true of the human body, too. Edward watched, and asked questions. Ludlow was a man who loved to be questioned. Always he gave the boy intelligent answers. How different this was from the school at Cirencester!

For his dissections, Daniel Ludlow used a small instrument which he called a lancet, and Edward longed for the time when he could handle one himself. How he would like to gain the accuracy of touch that he saw in the big, gentle hands of the surgeon. But he did not think himself far enough advanced to use the instrument yet. He was surprised when, one day, Mr. Ludlow put the lancet in his hands and told him to dissect a dead bird he had found.

“Study all its organs, the blood vessels, the muscles, the skin, the points where the feathers grow in the skin,” the surgeon directed.

Edward did this. It was a tremendous step forward for him.

Except for brief holidays with Stephen and Eleanor and his mother in Berkeley, Edward lived and worked here with Mr. Ludlow continuously for the next few years. The boy took an earnest personal interest in the patients. He drove with the surgeon to pay sick calls. He learned to help with the patients in Mr. Ludlow’s dispensary. When the surgeon performed operations, Edward handed him bowls of clean water and helped in other small ways. He passed Mr. Ludlow the instruments he called for, and helped to bandage the wounds. Edward learned to recognize the early signs of the known diseases, such as smallpox and typhus. He was troubled about the many diseases that no man of that day understood or could cure.

Because of his own terrible experience with smallpox inoculation, Edward often discussed this treatment with Mr. Ludlow.

“I am against inoculation,” Mr. Ludlow told him. “I feel that since there is so much danger of the inoculated person infecting others, it should not be done except in times of an epidemic. Besides, the methods are too crude, and the inoculation often does great harm to a person’s health, as in your case.”

Edward agreed with him, for he even yet had not fully regained his former robust health and strength.

In these hours and years of working together, Mr. Ludlow and Edward became very good friends. Often Mr. Ludlow told Edward about his own medical training. During his years in London he had studied with the great surgeon John Hunter, and he had met many other physicians and surgeons while he was there.

None of the others could compare with John Hunter, however, he declared. There was a man with a great mind—a man who was tireless in the pursuit of solid facts and truths.

On another occasion Ludlow explained Hunter’s attitude toward the work of observing and discovering new facts. Many good men jumped to conclusions too readily, he said, but never John Hunter. And Mr. Ludlow recalled one of Hunter’s favorite admonitions: “Don’t think, investigate!” Of course, Hunter had not meant that a person should not think about what he observed. He had meant that a person should not try to think things out without thorough observation first. For through loose thinking a thousand erroneous ideas might be born in men’s minds, and these held back the study of medicine.

Edward liked what he heard about John Hunter. It must be wonderful to study with so great a man, he thought.

Early one morning, he and Daniel Ludlow were in the dispensary. The patients had not yet arrived, and Edward was busy setting the place in perfect order.

Mr. Ludlow opened a drawer, took out a new lancet, and gave it to Edward. The boy had become remarkably able at small-animal dissections, the surgeon said, and he was proud of his pupil. Edward should have a lancet of his own.

Edward took up the instrument and fingered it with pride. “Thank you. Thank you,” he said. It was a happy day for him.

Mr. Ludlow and Edward served their patients seven days a week, and often at night, too. Whenever someone was ill and sent for the surgeon, Mr. Ludlow went. And always Edward went with him.

A milkmaid came to the office one day for the treatment of a slight ailment. Mr. Ludlow and Edward Jenner were talking about cowpox, and the young woman said she had had cowpox and so could not take smallpox. Edward knew, of course, that surgeons, physicians, and all the educated people of the time called this a “dairy-country superstition.”

Still, what if there is something in this idea? he asked himself.

After the patient had left, he talked to Daniel Ludlow about it. But Ludlow shook his head.

“There is no truth to it,” he said. “There is no truth to it. And I can give you proof. I have had several patients who took cowpox on one of the dairy farms and then later fell ill of smallpox.”

That seemed to be proof enough, and Edward did not go on with the conversation. But the milkmaid’s firm belief that she was now immune to the dreaded smallpox made an impression that never fully left him again.

Many times when he and Ludlow made their calls he asked milkmaids and herders about their belief concerning cowpox. And always he got the same answer that the other milkmaid had given. He thought that perhaps there might be some degree of truth in it. But how could one prove it?

So the months passed. There was much work, much serious thought. But there was some time for amusement and leisure, too. Once in a long while there were evenings when no patients needed the two. Then Edward, now growing into young manhood, went to a coffeeshop in the town, or to the homes of the young people with whom he had become acquainted. He met one young man who had read at least as much as Edward himself, though on different subjects. The two soon became friends, and often discussed the poetry they had read. Edward’s friend also encouraged him to start writing poetry himself.

By the time Edward was eighteen, he was an assistant to Mr. Ludlow and was able to treat many patients himself. They no longer called him Master Edward, as they had at first. They called him Mr. Jenner. Mr. Ludlow considered the young man’s apprentice days over. Still, Edward Jenner knew that there was much more to learn, and to Mr. Ludlow’s great pleasure he stayed on for a while longer.

FOUR

Two Great Years

Edward Jenner was now twenty years old. He had become a capable assistant surgeon. He had been studying with Mr. Ludlow for almost seven years, and the surgeon was very fond of him.

One afternoon while the two were working together in the pharmacy, Mr. Ludlow spoke to young Jenner of his future.

“I have been thinking,” the older man said, “that you will soon be ready to leave me. You are old enough, and you have learned about all I can teach you.”

“Hardly that,” said Edward, “but I suppose it is time I started to make a living.”

Mr. Ludlow put down the pestle with which he was working a powder into fine smoothness. Would earning a living be immediately necessary? he asked. Wouldn’t it be financially possible for the young man to study in London for a while?

Edward admitted that he had thought of the possibility occasionally, but with whom could he study?

Mr. Hunter, the teacher he would like, would not take him into one of his groups, Edward was sure. He undoubtedly took only very brilliant young men.

“Your mind is quite good enough for that,” Mr. Ludlow said with a smile. “Indeed, I think it is just the kind of mind John Hunter would like. You are a keen, accurate observer—and that is essential if one is going to study with him. I shall write to him and ask.”

Young Edward Jenner was excited by the idea. All the following week he thought about it, and he discussed it with Stephen and Eleanor when he visited them on the weekend.

One day some weeks later, Edward Jenner came into Daniel Ludlow’s dispensary and saw that the surgeon was reading a letter and that he looked very pleased.

When Ludlow had finished, he handed the letter to Edward. The young man saw that it was from John Hunter. The London surgeon wrote briefly that if Ludlow thought so well of young Jenner, he would be glad to take him on as a special student and assistant. Hunter went on to say that though he was over forty, he was still a bachelor, but that his house was well run by a housekeeper. He suggested that Edward live with him. In this way he could study with the surgeon closely and assist him in his work, an arrangement which Hunter hoped might be of benefit to both of them.

Young Edward Jenner was amazed and delighted. Of course he would go, he said, thanking Mr. Ludlow for helping him.

Soon after that, in 1770, Edward packed his seven-year accumulation of personal belongings. He hired a carriage and had his chest of clothing and his sacks and boxes of natural-history specimens piled into it, along with his books, his lancet, his violin, and a flute he now played. Then he said good-bye to his friend, Mr. Ludlow.

After a brief stay at home in Berkeley, made largely to visit his sick mother, he was ready to leave for London.

He took a fast chaise, and at dusk on the second day arrived in the great city on the Thames. At that hour the place was still wide awake and busy. Hailing a carriage, Edward had his chest hoisted to its top and got in, giving the driver Hunter’s address on Jermyn Street. As the vehicle rolled and bounced over the cobbled streets, the young man leaned close to the window to see London. There were many tall houses standing tightly side by side, with here and there an important-looking structure that seemed to be a public building or a large place of business. There were innumerable small shops and inns and coffeehouses. Everything looked dingy and sooty to this young man from the country, but he liked the stirring feeling of life and activity.

The streets were crowded with people and vehicles. Drays thundered by, loaded with barrels of ale. Other drays were filled with vegetables and meat, cloth and furniture and pottery. Servants of the wealthy and noble families trotted along, helping to carry sedan chairs in which ladies and gentlemen sat. Some yards ahead of each such chair walked a liveried servant, calling out his master’s name and commanding the common people to stand aside.

Fine carriages of every kind passed; these, too, carried the rich about their business or pleasure. Gorgeously uniformed officers rode by on proud horses. There were Life Guardsmen in scarlet tunics, horse grenadiers in their sky-blue caps, and halberdiers in red coats, with ruffles at the edges of their sleeves and at their throats. Laborers trudged along on foot. And here and there a gentleman, elegant in satin coat, knee breeches, and long white stockings, stepped carefully across the mud and trash in the street to make his way into some shop.

The city was very noisy. Men with baskets and small carts full of buttons, flowers, pots and pans, herbs, and oysters shouted or sang out odd little tunes telling what they had to sell.

Suddenly a new note of excitement swept like a wave along the roadway. A gorgeously liveried man on horseback could be seen, and people, carts, and drays parted before him, for he was announcing that His Majesty the King was coming that way. Then, in a rush, a glittering carriage drawn by eight horses passed and young Jenner, craning his neck, caught a glimpse of King George III.

The young man gave an exclamation of surprise and pleasure. He had seen more that was new, strange, and interesting during this short drive than he had seen in many months past in Bristol and Sodbury and Berkeley. Still, such a big city as London did not seem to him a very good place to live in, for there was too much poverty, dust, and dirt.

The carriage stopped abruptly, and the driver jumped down and announced that they had reached the address his passenger had given. Edward Jenner got out, went to the door of a large house, and struck the brass knocker sharply against its plate. In a moment a woman who introduced herself as Mr. Hunter’s housekeeper opened the door. Jenner paid the driver of the carriage and had him bring the trunk inside.

When the driver had gone his way, Jenner drew a deep breath and looked around him. He was in the house of John Hunter, and a new and important part of his life was about to begin. He inquired of the housekeeper whether Mr. Hunter was at home.

She hesitated a moment, then said that Mr. Hunter was busy writing, but she volunteered to take the young man to see him for a moment.

She led young Jenner along a passageway and into a room that looked like both an office and a study. By the light of two candles on a writing table he saw a man of strong, square build, with a broad forehead and a thick nose. Somehow, even sitting still, this man looked vigorous and aggressive. His hair was neither powdered nor bewigged in the fashion of the day, nor was it even very orderly. But his clothing, like the room he was in, was spotlessly neat and clean. His head was bowed, and he looked up for only an instant as the door opened—but that one glance was fiery and angry.

“I told you not to disturb me! ” he roared at the housekeeper. He did not even greet the young man he had invited into his house.

Jenner was shocked and embarrassed at this rudeness. The housekeeper, however, was not. She was used to her employer. A little scoldingly she said to John Hunter, “Hold your temper. We leave you gladly.”

Then she shut the door and quite cheerfully told young Jenner not to let Mr. Hunter’s mood trouble him. She led him to his room and directed him to come down to the dining room when he had freshened up.

Jenner was tired. The physical strain of the two days’ journey over rough roads had begun to make itself felt, and he was worried about his meeting with John Hunter.

Perhaps the man had changed his mind and did not wish Jenner to stay, he thought. Besides, Hunter looked rough and uncouth, and not at all like a gentleman. Edward Jenner was certain that he would have a hard time getting along with such a man. Had he made a mistake to come here? He ate his supper alone, and immediately afterward went up to bed.

When he came down to breakfast at 5:30 the next morning, John Hunter was waiting for him and greeted him heartily. He seemed not at all like the irritable man of the night before.

“I hope you did not take offense at me last night,” he said. “My days and evenings are full, and I must grasp what time I can for writing my notes. Interruptions are constant—if one lets them be. I refuse to let them, so that my mind may concentrate fully on what I am doing.”

The young man began to understand him. To Hunter, he saw, using his brain fully was more important than being polite. Edward Jenner could not but admire the man for the strength of his convictions. His misgivings began to leave him.

As they ate, Hunter talked of how much there was to be learned about nature. “I dissect and study all manner of animals and compare their anatomy with that of man,” he said. “If you are interested in this study, as I understand from Ludlow you are, you will find much here to occupy your mind.”

Breakfast finished, they went briefly to the rooms where Hunter had laid out and labeled many kinds of small animals which he had embalmed.

With these he was starting a museum of natural science, he said. He intended it for the use of generations of students to come.

John Hunter was expecting a group of students that morning, and they could already be heard arriving. Hunter’s work for the day was to dissect the body of one of the executed criminals that the law allowed him for study.

Young Jenner went with the anatomist into the dissecting room, which was beginning to fill with earnestfaced young men. Jenner took his place among them, and for three hours watched and listened intently. Each passing moment he became more impressed with the exceptional quality of John Hunter’s mind. In that age when doctors often jumped at half-truths and easily accepted inaccuracies, Hunter’s determination to recognize nothing but facts, nothing but the whole truth, was remarkable. He was a leader in urging a truly scientific approach to the work.

Jenner knew human anatomy only from books and from the chart on Mr. Ludlow’s dispensary wall, back in Sodbury. It was tremendously important to him as a young surgeon to see the actual structure of muscles, bones, tissues, and blood vessels, and to follow their course throughout the body. Above all, it was a great experience to discover Hunter’s attitude toward his work, and to come to know his mind and character, with its sense of responsibility, its love for truth.

In the weeks that followed, Edward Jenner spent almost all his waking hours with the great man. He became accustomed to his occasional flares of temper. The two men grew to admire and enjoy each other.

Every day, after the early-morning dissection class, Mr. Hunter saw patients in his office from nine to four, and he paid calls on those too sick to come to the dispensary. Edward Jenner accompanied him, and worked side by side with him. There were days when Hunter lectured at one of the hospitals, and Jenner attended, too. A little after four each afternoon, the two men dined. Afterward, they both took short naps, preparing themselves for long hours of hard work still to come. At five in the evening they were up, and Hunter lectured to students for two or three hours.

At seven or eight, after the students had left, Hunter went to his study and made notes on his observations of human anatomy and diseases, and answered letters or worked on articles. Just now he was writing a paper on surgical shock. Often he worked until one or two o’clock in the morning, and was up again by four or five in the chill, gray dawn.

During these evening hours when John Hunter worked alone in his study, Edward Jenner’s time was his own. He read books from Hunter’s shelves and often afterward played one of his musical instruments. Or, if he had an idea for a poem, he worked on that.

Once in a while, too, he went out to one of the London coffeehouses such as The Blue Boar or The Black Swan. He liked people and enjoyed an evening of conversation and laughter. In these places he saw many of the interesting people of the times. Among them was the author of The Vicar of Wakefield, Oliver Goldsmith, whose face was dreadfully scarred from smallpox. And there was Sir Joshua Reynolds, the famous painter. The elderly American statesman and scientist, Benjamin Franklin, also was pointed out to Jenner, as the great man sat at a table with several friends.

Sometimes Jenner came home fairly late at night. Then he might be in time to hear the men who came secretly and stealthily to the back door with bodies for dissection. These, Jenner knew, were the ruffians about which he had often heard—the body snatchers and “sack-’em-up men.” The young man came to know what a thriving business in stealing bodies these scoundrels did—digging corpses from new graves under cover of darkness, or snatching them from hospitals and almshouses before they could be buried. Because there were not enough cadavers to be had by legal means, the surgeons of the day were forced to deal with these men. Without dissection, they could not learn.

Sometimes a servant was at hand to let the “sack-’em-up men” in. Sometimes Edward Jenner or John Hunter opened the door for them. The ruffians would take the body into the dissecting room, snatch their pay, and slip out again quickly.

Jenner felt disturbed whenever he had to help with these gruesome and illegal acts. John Hunter also disliked the illegal part. Actually the government paid little attention to these midnight happenings. The men who stood high in the army wanted better surgeons for their soldiers in times of war, and those charged with enforcing the law knew that good surgeons would result only from more study of anatomy.

Whatever happened in Hunter’s workrooms and home was a part of Edward Jenner’s life here, and he took the unpleasant along with all that was valuable and good. The many different experiences that the days brought made him and John Hunter ever-greater friends.

Sometimes, when they were alone together, Hunter told Jenner something of his boyhood and how he had found his way into the study of surgery and medicine. John Hunter’s father had been a well-to-do man of Glasgow. John had been born there, the youngest of several sons and daughters. When he was still a small boy, the family had moved to Long Calderwood, about seven miles out of the city.

Medical knowledge had been in a very low state in those days, Hunter told Jenner. Medical doses had been made out of dung, and also out of the juice squeezed from wood lice, all probably on the theory that anything that was completely vile must be good for a person. For whooping cough, the prescription had been to put five leeches behind the ear, to suck the patient’s blood.

Hunter went on to say that he had been quite spoiled when he was young. He had not liked to go to school, and his parents had not insisted on it. Mostly he had been allowed to roam around the country as he liked. Though that had kept him back badly in formal education, it had given him a great opportunity to become a careful observer of nature. He had laid the foundations for his knowledge of natural science early and well, and he did not consider his childhood years altogether a loss.

Several of his sisters and brothers had died of tuberculosis. It was perhaps this tendency toward disease in the family that had aroused his older brother William’s interest in medicine and surgery. In any case, William had gone to London, had studied, and had progressed. He had become quite famous as an anatomist, a surgeon, and a lecturer by the time John himself had decided to take up his profession. John had asked his brother to let him work as an apprentice to him, and William had agreed to take him on.

“I was twenty when I came to London,” Hunter said. “My brother thought me a boor and shockingly badly educated. I was, and I knew it. I set myself the task of getting as broad an education as possible, and as quickly as I could. And because I was interested and my brain was good, I did learn fast. I also observed carefully what my brother did, and read on anatomy and medicine. The first time William asked me to prepare a body for a dissection class, he watched me lay the skin free of the flesh, and the flesh and muscle from the bone. I did it with precision, and he saw I was able and made me an assistant instead of an apprentice. I worked with him for twelve years before I began to practice and teach alone.”

William Hunter was also famous. Besides his lectures in anatomy he was working mainly at improving the methods used in childbirth. Both the brothers had sharp tempers and did not get along well together. Jenner attended some of William’s lectures at St. George’s Hospital, but he met William only occasionally at John Hunter’s house.

As Edward Jenner studied and observed cases in hospitals and in Hunter’s private practice, he grew constantly more aware of how many diseases there were about which the doctors knew little or nothing. He thought particularly often of smallpox, for daily he saw its ugly scars on the faces of the people around him. Students bore them, patients, men and women and children in the streets, friends and acquaintances of his and Hunter’s. From his reading the young man now knew more about the harm the disease had done. In the past century, forty million people had died of it in Europe. Two hundred thousand Europeans had died of it in a single year in the middle 1700’s. In one bad year in Russia alone two million people had died of smallpox.

Again and again Edward Jenner’s mind went back to his old desire to find a safe way to protect people against smallpox. He talked to John Hunter about the disease. He told him about the milkmaid near Sodbury who had recovered from cowpox and believed herself immune to smallpox, and about others from whom he had heard the same so-called old wives’ tale. He said that he, Jenner, felt that there might be a clue in this.

Hunter was interested, but he said, “Such an incident can only make one wonder. It is not proof. You must observe more cases and make repeated and accurate studies of them. Finally you must test your theory until there is no doubt left in your mind. I advise you to do that when you have the opportunity.”

“I think—.” Jenner began.

“Don’t think, investigate!” said Hunter.

Edward Jenner knew well that his teacher was right. It would take years of investigation to learn anything about the relation of cowpox to smallpox. He hoped to make such a study someday.

John Hunter and his brother William continued to quarrel. Edward Jenner was amazed that a person who was so controlled as John Hunter in the pursuit of his profession and his studies could be so uncontrolled in his relationship to other people. Hunter’s temper, Jenner saw, really was a constant problem to him. It broke out at times in his classes, and often when he was talking with fellow medical men. It made enemies for him. But there were many people who put up with Hunter’s temper because of his greatness, and because they saw that he was really a kind man and one who was always honest and fair. They appreciated and loved him for his good qualities and for his remarkable mind. Many of them called him “the dear man.”

Hunter was not a teacher who would tolerate poor or lazy minds. The lesser students in his classes dropped out early, and only the highly intelligent ones remained. It was clear that through these students Hunter would have a tremendously important influence on medicine and surgery for decades to come.

Edward Jenner was glad to be one of those students. He knew that these were the great years of his young life.

FIVE

A Choice to Make

John Hunter knew many of the prominent Englishmen of the time. One evening as he and Edward Jenner were having tea he talked to the young man about Captain James Cook, whom the Royal Society had sent on an expedition to the Pacific. The captain had set sail two years before, in the summer of 1768. He had planned to go to Madeira, Rio de Janeiro, around Cape Horn, and on to Tahiti. In Tahiti, Cook would make special observations of the planet Venus and its course in the southern skies. He would also visit New Zealand and chart its coasts. He was due to return to England in a short while. Jenner, interested always in natural history, spoke of the possibility of Cook’s bringing back a collection of botanical and zoological specimens. Hunter replied that indeed he would; he had taken along Joseph Banks, the naturalist, for that very purpose.

John Hunter was now a little over forty. He had never married, and he was so busy and active in his work that it did not occur to Edward Jenner that Hunter might even be interested in a woman.

Jenner was therefore quite taken aback one morning when John Hunter announced that he was going to be married.

The wedding took place soon after that at St. James Church in Piccadilly. The great surgeon and his bride left for France on a month’s wedding trip, and John Hunter’s classes were closed during that time. But his practice needed attention every day. He left Jenner in charge of it.

The young man was proud that the famous surgeon trusted him so much, but at first he was a little uncertain of his ability to handle his task well. He soon found that the work all seemed quite natural to him, however, and he enjoyed it. Now, for the first time, he was acting as a full-fledged surgeon.

When John Hunter returned home with his wife, he found his dispensary so neat and clean that he exclaimed over it. He also heard from his patients what a fine job young Jenner had done. The older man was pleased, but not surprised.

Edward Jenner made plans to move into an inn, now that Hunter was married and back home. But neither John nor Anne Hunter would have this.

Of course the young man must stay, Anne Hunter insisted. Her husband needed Jenner’s help and enjoyed his company. And she was glad to have him there, too.

As she showed every day thereafter, she meant what she had said. And Edward Jenner found it pleasant to have a well-bred, well-read woman in the house. Sometimes he spent an hour reading to her while she embroidered or sewed. Or he played his violin at her request. But these periods of relaxation were brief, and happened but seldom. Mostly, young Jenner was as busy as ever with John Hunter in the classrooms, the hospitals, the dissecting rooms, the natural-history room, and of course in the dispensary, treating patients.

Edward Jenner had been in London for a year and a half, and was now twenty-two. He had earned nothing in all the years of his studying, and he was beginning to feel that soon he must start his own career. He talked to his good friend John Hunter about it, and Hunter agreed with him that it was time.

He said abruptly, “Have you ever considered working with me, and perhaps becoming a partner?”

Jenner was proud to be offered such a position, but he pleaded for time to think it over. He was torn between his interest in natural science and his wish to establish himself as a surgeon, he said.

John Hunter could well understand this. Notwithstanding all the brilliant work he himself had done as a surgeon and all the fame that had come to him because of it, he too was still equally interested in natural science. He sometimes said that when his life and works were summed up in the future, he hoped that the greater fame would come to him because of his collections of natural-science specimens, and his papers and notes on comparative anatomy. He cautioned his young assistant to think over his future well, so that he might make the right decision.

Edward Jenner and the Hunters had eaten dinner one afternoon at their usual time. They were about to retire to their rooms when someone rattled the brass knocker on the front door. The servant went to see who it was, and came back in a moment saying that there was a gentleman to see Hunter.

At first, John Hunter was impatient that a visitor should have arrived just at his rest hour. But when he learned the visitor’s name, his manner changed and he became a genial host. The caller was Joseph Banks, the botanist who had gone on the expedition with Captain James Cook.

The expedition had taken Captain Cook and his party completely around the world, Joseph Banks reported. In the course of the journey they had explored places entirely unknown to the people of Europe, and had revisited many little-known seas and islands.

In his work as a naturalist, Banks had enjoyed the fullest cooperation from Captain Cook, he reported. The ship’s crew, and often Cook himself, had been at the naturalist’s disposal in gathering plants and their seeds and flowers. Some plants had been dried, and others had been planted in boxes and jars. And many small animals had been collected, too. Some of these had been brought home alive. Others had been killed, and their skins or their embalmed bodies had been saved. The insects had been the easiest to collect, for they kept well in a dried condition.

John Hunter suggested that he and Edward Jenner would greatly enjoy seeing Banks’s collections, and the naturalist immediately invited them to come to his place, where all the boxes, crates, and cages now were.

“But I must tell you why I came to see you today, Mr. Hunter,” he went on. “The point is that I need help. I am a botanist more than a zoologist, and I need someone to catalog the animal specimens. Knowing of your important contribution to natural science in the field of zoology, Hunter, I came to ask if you might be interested enough—and could perhaps find the time—to do this.”

Hunter said that he could not take the time, but he immediately suggested Edward Jenner for the job.

Joseph Banks was a little embarrassed. He did not want to hurt the young man’s feelings, but he truly did not think anyone short of Hunter would do. Politely he said he would think the matter over, and prepared to leave. But John Hunter would not let him go until he had made him realize what an exceptional young scholar Edward Jenner was.

In the end, Joseph Banks agreed to let Jenner try out with him. He asked the young man to come to his estate in Soho the next day. Soho, which is today a crowded part of London, was at that time on the outskirts of the city. Its great houses were surrounded by large plots of land.

Edward Jenner drove out to Soho early the next day, and with Joseph Banks looked over the collection of animals. The young man felt a little overwhelmed by the enormity of the task of classifying, cataloging, and labeling all these creatures, but at the same time he could not wait to start the work. He decided that it would take him at least six months to finish the project.

As they walked around among the animals, he and Joseph Banks talked about them. After an hour or so, the older man realized that Edward Jenner knew a great deal more than he, Banks, had thought. Banks accordingly gave up worrying about the matter, and turned the work over to the young man. He himself then went off to continue cataloging his botanical specimens.

Edward Jenner began his task by making lists in which he put together into groups all the animals that had certain characteristics in common and so were related to one another. He then cataloged the animals by their groups, and also individually. And he labeled all the cages of animals, all the skins, all the dried insects. He organized his work so well that the cataloging went along much faster than he had expected. Each day when be drove out to take up his task at the Banks estate his enthusiasm and enjoyment grew.

He watched the live animals and took notes on their behavior and habits. Most of all, perhaps, he was interested in the birds, for he had studied and watched those of his own countryside since he was a small boy. Some of those that Banks had brought home from the distant islands were huge, and had wingspans of many feet. Others were small, some as small as the tiny English hummingbirds. Edward Jenner saw the relationships of some of these foreign birds to English birds.

Joseph Banks often came to watch Jenner work and to talk with him. They now felt like old friends who had known each other for years, and they made fast headway with their cataloging of the collection. They had allowed six months for the work, and they were finished in two. During that time they had turned the Banks estate into a zoological and botanical garden. A few other naturalists were invited to see it even before the work was quite completed, and most enthusiastic of all the visitors was John Hunter.

As Jenner neared the conclusion of his work and only a few more days remained, he realized that he would miss it when it was over. Still, he had lately begun to think again of his career as a surgeon.

He was finishing his last reports one afternoon when Joseph Banks came into the workshop, accompanied by a robust man of about forty. It was Captain James Cook.

After they had talked a moment, Captain Cook remarked that he had heard from Banks about the splendid work Edward Jenner had done here. Cook had a proposal to make. He was starting on another expedition early in the coming year, and needed an expert zoologist. Would Edward Jenner come with him and take charge of collecting more zoological specimens?

Needless to say, Jenner was flattered by the offer and he thought to himself that it was remarkable. He would never have believed this opportunity would be offered to him. But there was his old uncertainty as to which of his careers he should take up as his life’s work. He knew that if he went on this expedition he would be away for several years, and that a long absence might ruin his chances of becoming a surgeon. Did he really want that?

He asked for time to think the question over, and Captain Cook left with the understanding that Jenner would let him know his decision soon.

Back at John Hunter’s house that evening, Edward Jenner told his good friend about Captain Cook’s offer, and the two talked it over.

Hunter would not advise Jenner. “The decision must be your own,” he said.

But he drew Jenner out, so that the young man expressed his own opinions and feelings. And as he talked, it became clearer in Edward Jenner’s mind that he certainly would not like to give up being a surgeon. Like Hunter, he decided, he would continue his interest in natural science, but surgery would come first for him.

For a week or so more he worked at Joseph Banks’s estate, and the last of the cataloging was finished. Shortly after that, Edward Jenner received news that his mother, ill for so long, had died. He went home for the funeral, and returned to London a few days later, sad and quiet.

In the next few weeks he thought much about his future as a surgeon. There was another decision to make now. Should he practice here in London, or back home in Gloucestershire?

One day he talked to John Hunter about the question, and once more Hunter offered him a partnership. He also suggested that Jenner would do well if he wanted to set up a practice for himself in London. The young man knew he would make much more money in London than in Berkeley, and he might become more famous. And there was Hunter. Working with him would be invaluable, and a pleasure.

On the other hand, Jenner had never really come to like the life of the big city. Always within him there was a strong longing for the Berkeley Valley, in Gloucestershire. At last he made his decision. He would go back and start his practice as a surgeon there.

This time, the journey back to Berkeley was pleasant for Edward Jenner. His mind was full of thoughts about his future, and he was eagerly impatient to start his work in the village.

For some weeks past he had corresponded with his brother and sister-in-law about his new practice. They were in favor of his establishing his surgery in their home, and wrote him that they had furnished two small rooms on the ground floor for him. Edward Jenner was touched by their warmth and kindness. It was a strange, but also good feeling for him to go back as an adult to work in the region where he had lived as a child, and where he had grown up.

The coach that took him to Gloucestershire bounced and rocked and swayed as the horses trotted along, for the road was deeply rutted. In places it was muddy too, and the horses’ hoofs and the wheels sent the mud back in showers and spatters.

Early on the afternoon of the second day they reached Bristol—as far as the coach went. Alighting here, Jenner set about hiring a carriage to take him on to Berkeley. He had his personal luggage and packages and cases transferred to it, and was on the last brief stretch of his journey.

The land was poor around here. There was little to please one’s eyes or raise one’s spirits. But now the road went rather steeply up a hill and when the carriage reached the top, Jenner’s heart lifted. Below him the land changed. It looked prosperous. Everywhere it opened out into beautiful views. The houses and barns of the dairy farmers he knew so well were trim and neat and comfortable. Here was his beloved valley of Berkeley.

Driving through the lanes now, Jenner remembered their beauty in many a springtime past. Spring would be here soon again, and the hawthorn would be in white bloom. Jenner thought of the many times he had walked in these meadows and watched the birds and the small furry animals and the insects. He would be able to do that again in his leisure hours.

The village of Berkeley was now plainly in view, and a few minutes later Jenner was at his brother’s house. There he was warmly welcomed.

Tomorrow Edward Jenner would open his boxes and put everything in place in the little office that Stephen had readied for him. His lancet, scalpel, scissors, sutures, needles, and other surgical instruments would be put into the glass-fronted case. Into the jars on the open shelves would go the various ingredients from which he would make his medicines. Then he would be ready to begin his new life.

SIX

A Sign on His Door

In starting a surgical practice at Berkeley in 1773, Edward Jenner knew that three things were against him. First, people did not easily give their confidence to a beginner. Second, he looked even younger than he was, for he had a round and somewhat rosy face and was not very tall. And third—and this was perhaps his greatest handicap—everyone here in this valley had known him as a child and growing boy. He was young Edward, or Ned, to them. It would be hard for them to think of him as a grown-up and a good surgeon. Naturally, everyone would keep on going to the older and more established medical men of the nearby towns for quite a while.

In Edward Jenner’s favor, however, was the convenience for the neighboring people in having a surgeon immediately in their own home area.

He nailed up his sign, Edward Jenner, Surgeon, expecting to have to wait a few days, maybe even a week, before his first patient came. When two weeks passed, and then another, and no one arrived, however, he began to worry.

He was sitting at the desk in his empty rooms one morning, wondering whether he should have stayed in London and started his practice there. Suddenly he heard footsteps and the sound of a child crying outside, then a knock on his office door. A farm woman with a small girl was standing there. The child’s arm was wrapped in a woolen shawl, and her clothing was splotched with blood.

Her mother was terrified. The little girl had fallen on a scythe and cut herself, and the woman feared she might lose her arm.

Jenner tried to calm the mother. He took the two into his surgery, picked the child up gently, and set her on the examination table. Then he looked at the wound. It was a long, deep slash in the arm. By good fortune the main blood vessel had not been cut. He unfastened the little girl’s dress enough so that he could draw her arm out and reach the wound better. The child was losing a good deal of blood, and he worked quickly.

He washed the cut to remove the bits of straw and dirt that clung to the flesh. The child’s loud crying turned to sobs. The surgeon was kind and gentle, but firm, and soon the little girl was no longer afraid.

Now came the most difficult part. Jenner prepared a suture needle and cautioned the child that he might hurt her, but she must be brave.

Her mother was wringing her hands. She was so nervous that Jenner decided he could proceed better without her. He led her into the waiting room and asked her to stay there. Then he shut the door firmly and went back to the child. Holding her so that he could keep her fairly still, he quickly stitched the two edges of the slash together. She screamed once or twice, then the work was done. Reaching for a white bandage, Jenner wound it around her arm and wiped away her tears. Then he washed his hands and gave the child a piece of candy.

Her pain was almost entirely forgotten as the little girl put the sweet into her mouth. With his hand on her thin shoulder he took her to her mother.

The woman was happy to see her child so calm and the wound so neatly bandaged. Yet she asked once more, “There’s no danger of Nell losing her arm, is there?”

“Certainly not,” Edward Jenner assured her.

She gave a deep sigh of relief, and gazed admiringly at him. A look of great trust and appreciation came into her face. She introduced herself then. “I am Mrs. Turnbull.”

She thanked Jenner over and over for taking care of her child so well, and listened attentively as he gave her his instructions.

When the woman and child had gone, Jenner went back into his office to wait out the day. No other patient appeared. He was quite depressed again by evening. Only one patient in nearly three weeks! It began to look like certain failure for him.

The next day he came down to the surgery, steeled once more against the feeling of hopelessness. To his amazement he saw another patient sitting in the waiting room. The man said he had come because Mrs. Turnbull had spoken so well of Mr. Jenner. Several days later there was another patient, and a dozen more came during the next month. Edward knew he had Mrs. Turnbull to thank for the turn in his fortunes.

Gradually the well-to-do families of the neighborhood also began to think of him as a surgeon instead of merely the boy they had always known. They too became his patients.

Week by week and month by month his grew. He consulted patients in his office every day except Sundays. And when people were too ill to come to him, he went many miles to call on them at their farms or estates. Sometimes he rode on horseback, sometimes he drove in a light carriage or cart.

Jenner was more than greatly relieved that his practice was now so well started—he was downright happy. He thought of John Hunter and wrote him of his success. Mr. Ludlow came into his mind again, too, and one day he made a trip to Sodbury to tell his former teacher his good news. Ludlow was very glad to see him and assured him he would make a good surgeon.

There were many pleasant things about living and practicing in Berkeley. The fields and meadows and lanes held out opportunities for pleasant trips. Old friends who lived nearby came to visit Jenner; and, as before, they invited him to their homes. Some of his family came from some distance to see him, and they brought their children.

His brother Henry, who was a vicar in another county, came with his wife and small son, Henry. The boy was about three years old, and bright and friendly. Edward Jenner carried him about as he showed his brother the dispensary. And later when the family sat in the drawing room, talking, the small boy came and leaned on the arm of his uncle’s chair, gazing at him with confidence and liking.

Though Edward Jenner’s practice kept him fairly busy now, there was still time for his natural-science interests. During the years with John Hunter and the zoological work with Joseph Banks, Jenner’s mind had expanded, his powers of observation had increased. Now he watched the wild creatures with new keenness and accuracy. He watched the birds especially, and became more and more interested in cuckoos.

He saw robins, sparrows, and other birds making their nests, but though there were many cuckoos, he never observed one of them building a nest. This circumstance seemed strange to him. Where and when did they nest? Where did they lay their eggs? It was highly puzzling. The naturalist in Jenner made him determined to find out the answer. He continued to watch the cuckoos whenever he was outdoors.

Soon after he had written Hunter about his first few patients, Jenner had received a letter from the city surgeon, expressing pleasure that the new practice was going well. And Hunter had urged Jenner to send word of anything interesting he saw in the field of natural science. Soon the two were in correspondence about the odd behavior of the cuckoos. John Hunter asked Edward Jenner to continue watching until he found an answer to the mystery. He also asked his country friend to get various birds’ nests for him—some with eggs in them—for his museum. Edward Jenner gladly collected and sent them. Later Hunter asked for the stomach of a cuckoo.

One day Jenner was busy in his dispensary when a light carriage drove up and two young men got down. They were medical students, come from the Gloucester Infirmary. They had driven the sixteen miles as fast as they could, they said, to see if Mr. Jenner would help them out. They had a man in the infirmary who was desperately ill with a strangulated hernia. The surgeon, Mr. Crump, could not operate because he had become ill himself. The students, who were at the hospital to help, watch, and learn, knew that the patient would die if an operation was not performed very soon. They had heard what a fine surgeon Jenner was, and hoped he would come and take Mr. Crump’s place.

Of course Jenner would come. He finished with the patient he had, then harnessed his horse to his carriage and was ready.

The medical students led the way, and Jenner followed. As soon as they arrived at the Gloucester Infirmary, he was taken to the patient. The man was already in poor condition and obviously would have difficulty in standing the painful and strenuous operation. Everyone, including the students, thought he could not live through it.

Edward Jenner prepared the man quickly, however, and operated skillfully. The patient was weak, but alive, as the surgeon finished. The students and doctors at the hospital were very much impressed with the way Jenner had worked. They listened earnestly to the instructions he left for the patient’s care.

Although he could not visit the man again, Jenner received a message from the infirmary every week. Finally he was told that the patient was out of danger and doing well. Word spread from one surgeon to another and from student to student about the remarkable operation Mr. Jenner had performed.

One day Daniel Ludlow came to see Jenner at his surgery and complimented him. He looked the dispensary over and took a personal pleasure in everything he saw.

A little later, Jenner received a letter from him. “The excellent reputation you have made for yourself in Berkeley and in Bristol has spread widely,” Ludlow wrote. “My friends and colleagues are interested in you, and your name has been put up for membership in the medical society of Gloucester.” He wrote further that the men met in the evenings every other month in the town of Alveston. Over dinner at the Ship Inn they discussed medicine and surgery and told of their difficult cases and of their failures or successes. “You will find it interesting, and I believe you will benefit from these meetings.”

Jenner was delighted to be accepted by the established medical men of the vicinity. He went to the next meeting and enjoyed himself hugely. In the following years he attended meetings regularly, and the members became his friends and companions. He had their respectful attention when he spoke on medical and surgical matters. But not all their talk was serious. They liked to joke and laugh, and here Edward Jenner fitted in, too, for he had a good sense of humor and his laugh was hearty.

Jenner had a pleasant social life in Berkeley. For generations his family and the other old families in the towns and on the big country estates had mingled. Boys and girls with whom Edward Jenner had played or gone to school in his childhood had grown up, married, and established country homes of their own. These people were his friends.

In nearby Bath there were coffeehouses like the ones in London, and he sometimes went there to meet acquaintances from many miles around for an evening of talk. There he came to know Dr. Parry, who became a lifelong friend.

At the homes of his friends around Berkeley he enjoyed the company of the attractive young daughters and visiting cousins. Yet somehow he never thought of courting any of the girls.

From the beginning of his work here in the Gloucestershire farm region, Edward Jenner had been watching for an opportunity to examine a case of cowpox. He wanted to observe the pustule in order to see if it looked like that of smallpox. He wanted to study people who took the disease.

He inquired about cowpox of every farmer to whose dairy farm he was called in times of illness. But he found that in these years there were no cases of the disease among their cattle. For the present, at least, he was completely stopped in his investigations. Fortunately, too, these were years when there was no smallpox epidemic. But Jenner knew that this condition could not last. Sooner or later the disease would strike again.

Some weeks after he had sent Hunter the stomach of a cuckoo, he received a letter from him. Hunter wrote: “I received yours, and also the cuckoo’s stomach. I should like to have a few more of them, for I find they do not all show the same thing.” Here was the scientific-minded, accurate Hunter again, tracking down facts tirelessly. He asked Jenner to tame a young cuckoo and learn the exact sound of the note it made early in its life. He asked for some cuckoos’ nests, saying, “I do not care how many you send.” He also wanted a crow’s and a magpie’s nest, preferably with the branches to which they were fastened. He ended by saying, “I hear you saying, ‘there is no end to your wants.’ ”

But Edward Jenner did not find Hunter’s requests tedious, nor was it difficult for him to satisfy a few. Jenner’s own constant studies and observations were in much the same field. But he could not find a cuckoo’s nest to send.

Cuckoos interested him more and more, and there was never a week in spring or summer when he did not go out to watch the birds for some hours. He took notes on their habits and was still puzzled by much that he could not seem to find out concerning them. He asked Hunter to let him know if he heard of any discoveries about them by other naturalists.

As a surgeon he became especially interested in heart disease. In the course of his work he observed carefully every such case among his patients. He studied animals’ hearts by dissecting birds and other small, dead creatures. He became particularly interested in an inflammation of the heart that some people contracted from a kind of rheumatism. In this way he probably began to uncover facts about what we now call rheumatic fever and its effect on the heart. He studied and took notes on tuberculosis and many other diseases and corresponded with Hunter about them. And he began to write a series of papers on heart cases.

He was fascinated by the progress that people were making in other fields of science and invention. A man by the name of James Watt, he read, was working on a steam engine. More and more was being discovered about the mysterious force called electricity. A man had sent up a balloon with a basket large enough to carry a person. It was one of the early attempts to start man on the way to air travel. Altogether, this was an age of experimentation and discovery, and Jenner took an interest in all new ideas.

Edward Jenner was still single, and he did not think very seriously about getting married. Some of the young women he met socially he found pleasant, and some very attractive. Sometimes he took one of them to a picnic arranged by the church. Or he invited one or two of them to ride horseback with him through the beautiful countryside. But they were his friends, nothing more, and he seldom called on a girl more than once or twice.

He had been a surgeon in Berkeley for six years when he met a young woman who made a different and stronger impression on him. In fact, he fell in love with her. But when he told her so, he found that she was already engaged to a young officer serving with the British troops in the American colonies.

For the next seven years or so, he was again only coolly friendly toward the young women he met socially. His profession and his interest in natural science absorbed him fully.

SEVEN

The Growing Interest

Every now and then, smallpox broke out again in England. In the Berkeley Valley there had been none for several years, then Jenner found that one of his patients had the disease. Soon after, reports came to him from physicians and surgeons in nearby towns, saying that they too had such cases. The news was alarming for, once started, the illness always spread rapidly.

Again Edward Jenner grieved that there was no harmless way to protect people against smallpox. He did not like to give inoculations such as he had received when a child, using dry and weakened smallpox pus, for he had suffered so much ill health from this cause. But in times like these it was necessary to take a chance on anything that might help. He therefore sent those who wished to go, to smallpox inoculation stables and gave them inoculations there.

One morning, well before the office was open, a farm woman, Mrs. Perkins, knocked at the door of the house. The housekeeper went to see who was there and then called Jenner.

Mrs. Perkins was nervous, and breathless from hurrying. She looked troubled. Her husband was very sick, she said, and she feared he had smallpox. Could Jenner come back with her?

“Certainly,” said Jenner.

“Perhaps you can do something for my husband,” the woman said worriedly.

“I will do all I can,” Jenner said, trying to calm her. “And, first of all, don’t jump at conclusions. Perhaps it isn’t smallpox, after all.”

In a few minutes, Edward Jenner was on horseback, with his medical kit. Mrs. Perkins got back into her cart. Quickly they made their way to the farm. When they arrived, Mrs. Perkins led the surgeon into the dusky bedroom where her husband lay. The room was in some disorder and the curtains were drawn. The man on the bed lifted his head and said, “Is that the doctor?” His voice was full of fear.

Jenner went to look at the patient. He found George Perkins very ill; his skin was already broken out with pustules. A brief examination assured him that Mrs. Perkins’s guess had been right. Her husband had smallpox.

When Edward Jenner told the patient and his wife that their worst fears were realized, the two were in despair.

“Can you do anything at all for him?” Mrs. Perkins asked. “Or must he die?”

Jenner drew her out of the room in order to talk to her.

“He may recover,” Jenner said, “but I cannot promise that. The disease must run its course. But with good care, your husband will have an easier time and his chances of recovery will be better.”

“I know,” Mrs. Perkins said. “I shall nurse him well.”

But Jenner would not let her.

“You have not had smallpox yourself, Mrs. Perkins,” he said. “You would catch it from your husband. Besides, I believe you were never inoculated.”

“No, I wasn’t,” she admitted.

Jenner then asked whether there was not some servant on the farm who had recovered from smallpox. Such a person could serve as nurse, he said.

A milkmaid whose name was Ann was called into the room. She curtsied to Jenner. The surgeon saw how clear her complexion was. Her skin had a satin smoothness. He shook his head. This girl would not do, either. Obviously she had never had smallpox.

“No, I haven’t,” Ann admitted. “But I have had cowpox, sir, and I cannot take smallpox.”

“It is believed by most people that that is just a superstition,” Jenner said. “Isn’t there some other servant here who has had the disease?”

There were several, he was told. But Ann said that they did not know how to take care of the sick, as she did.

Jenner still hesitated. The girl would have to come into direct contact with Mr. Perkins and with the dreadful disease. Was she sure she wanted to take the risk? he asked.

“I cannot catch smallpox,” the girl insisted. “I have taken care of several people who had the disease, and I did not take it from them.” Again she said, “That’s because I had cowpox. I know it.”

Jenner then agreed to leave the patient in Ann’s care. “You may perhaps be naturally resistant to smallpox,” he said. He still felt troubled, but he was also very much interested.

Jenner gave Ann instructions concerning the care of the patient—what to do for him, and what not to do. He did not want her to give him any home medicines or have him bled. He believed such treatment weakened the patient, and he wanted him to gain all strength possible so that his body could fight off the disease by natural means.

Ann promised to follow his instructions, and Mrs. Perkins thanked the surgeon for coming. He went back to his horse and rode off.

All the way home Edward thought about the beautiful, clear, rosy skin of the milkmaid, and about her complete confidence that she would not contract Mr. Perkins’s disease.

In time, Mr. Perkins recovered from the smallpox, though not without much suffering, and of course, he had scars afterward.

But the interesting thing was that Ann, the milkmaid, actually did not take it from him. This and other such instances teased Jenner’s mind. They stirred his old interest. He told himself he must get started on his research into this matter. He must see if he could collect proof of this alleged effect of cowpox on people.

First of all, he must study the cowpox pustules themselves. But there seemed no way for him to do his research.

He began to search for the disease. At every dairy farm where he went to see patients he inquired whether any of the cows had cowpox. But always he was told that there were no signs of it.

One day he went to the farm of William Brown, to ask the elderly farmer what he knew about this cow disease. Why had none of the cows in the neighborhood become infected with it for so long a time?

“I don’t know that any more than you do,” the farmer said. “Once we had no cowpox in this region for ten years.”

Ten years! Jenner was amazed, and he felt frustrated. He hoped, for the sake of the study he was trying to make, that there would not be a ten-year pause this time.

At first he thought there was nothing to do but wait. After a while, however, he began to think that there was something else he could do—something that might lead him to part of his answer.

He must check up on what Ludlow had said years ago, namely that some people who had suffered from cowpox did catch smallpox later on, after all. By asking every milkmaid and herder who had caught the cattle disease he would find out what proportion of them seemed to have become resistant to smallpox afterward, and what proportion had not. That knowledge might throw some light on his questions.

This kind of investigation took a tremendous amount of time and patience; so much detailed work had to be done, and for so long. And in the end it might or might not lead to a piece of valuable information. The mind and spirit of a scientist were needed to carry the study through, and Edward Jenner was possessed of the necessary qualities.

A meeting of the medical society was scheduled at about that time. As Jenner rode over to join his colleagues for the evening his thoughts were full of the problem he was trying to solve.

When he came into the inn he saw that the long table was ready and the surgeons were already seated. The flickering candles spread a soft, pleasant light over the room. He saw Daniel Ludlow sitting at one end, and bowed to him and others. The glow of warm friendship spread through him as he took his seat.

The conversation ran along lightly for a while. A few jokes were told, and there was laughter. Some of the men asked questions about each other’s families. Then the serious talk began. One surgeon told of a particularly bad double-fracture case he had treated the week before. Another told of the severe, persistent pains that one of his patients had in his side. He was not at all certain what caused them. The men discussed the symptoms and gave their opinions.

Jenner listened, but in the back of his mind there was this problem of cowpox and smallpox. He wanted to lay it before his friends. He knew their interest would be hard to win, but if he could get them to work with him on the investigation, there would be many advantages. More cases could be listed and described, and the work would go much faster. It was worth trying.

He waited for a slight pause in the conversation, then cautiously mentioned to the man beside him the cow disease and the herders’ and dairymaids’ belief that it offered protection against smallpox.

He got no further, for immediately the man laughed. “That old wives’ tale,” he said. And to make a joke and tease his respected friend he repeated Jenner’s remark to the surgeon on the other side of him. This man laughed heartily, too. Jenner saw that he would never be able to get help from his colleagues at this stage of his investigation. The men thought he was merely making a little joke! If they knew what he was considering they would probably think him out of his mind. He smiled to cover his distress, and gave up the thought of even mentioning his idea again. Whatever investigation he wanted to make would have to be carried out by himself alone. That was clear.

In the following months Edward Jenner visited the dairy farmers frequently. He came even when there was no sickness in their houses. He went riding along the roads on his less busy mornings or afternoons, carrying a small black notebook. He began by asking the farmer for permission to talk to his helpers. He wrote down every detail of past cases of cowpox in humans. He asked the victims how they had caught the disease. Had they been exposed to smallpox afterward, and had they caught it?

“What does Mr. Jenner want to know all that for?” the dairy helpers asked one another when he had gone. “This is daft,” one said. “Cowpox cannot be of interest to a surgeon,” said another.

But the well-dressed, dignified figure on horseback kept coming. He seemed constantly to be on the country roads and lanes on his way to and from the farms.

He faced the shortcomings in his investigation. No doubt there would be many inaccuracies in the information gathered in this way. But then, there were always difficulties in research. He would watch for the inaccuracies and try to pick out the tiny points of truth that might show themselves. Even the smallest fact he discovered would be worth while, even if the result merely set him to search for the answer in some different direction.

For many months he went on making his inquiries. Now and then he mentioned them in a letter to Hunter. The older surgeon was always interested, but like Jenner waited for definite proof.

Altogether, Jenner talked to two hundred farm people in these months. Then he decided he had all the information he could get by questioning. He laid his notebook on the writing table in his dispensary and, whenever no patients were at hand, he studied it. He worked late at night too, when the rest of the household was fast asleep.

He had tossed out the testimony of about fifty people because it was too uncertain. Of the other one hundred and fifty, about forty-five had caught smallpox after having cowpox. Looking at these figures he told himself that the whole long inquiry had been worthless. It proved nothing.

For a moment he felt exhausted, hopeless. He was in despair of ever finding an answer to the puzzle.

Still, there was something in him that would not give up. For one thing, he could not fully accept his own findings. There might be something he had missed, something he had done wrong, he told himself at last. When he went to bed that night, his mind churned with dissatisfaction and concern.

He was silent and serious the next day as he went about seeing patients in the office and on the farms.

A day or two later, while Edward Jenner was looking at his notes again, a fresh thought came to him.

How do I know that all the people I questioned actually had cowpox? he asked himself. What if some were cases of other diseases of the skin? If so, my estimate of the interviews would be wrong, for it would be based partly on other diseases. In that case, there would still be a good possibility that cowpox makes people resistant. This I must study in more detail.

He began to reread his notes on cowpox cases. He also studied again the matter of their exposure to smallpox afterward.

He sorted out all the cases that had similar symptoms, and found that they fell into two groups. Those people who had taken smallpox after cowpox definitely had shown somewhat different symptoms from those who had become resistant.

He felt as if a door had opened in his mind. Now he had something new to work on. He would inquire further of every farmer who knew anything about cows’ diseases. He would study every rash or outbreaking on the cows’ udders, and see whether there was another disease that looked somewhat like cowpox. Here was hope that his theory might still prove to be right.

The first thing to do was consult Henry Clayton, the veterinarian, and get some information from him.

The next day he drove to Gloucester and inquired where Henry Clayton had his professional headquarters. Once at the man’s house, he began to ask him questions.

“Have you any idea why there aren’t any cases of cowpox in this area now?”

“Yes, I have,” Clayton answered. “There used to be cowpox on the farms all the time. But I believed that it came from the filth around the barns and sheds and pens. I got those farmers to clean their places up, and it seems to have worked.”

Jenner went on, “Are there other diseases in which pustules like those of smallpox develop?”

“Yes, there are,” Henry Clayton said. “That is why a man can’t get a clear description of cowpox from the farmers. Whenever one of their cows gets any kind of pustules they call it cowpox. And I must admit, the different kinds are sometimes hard to tell apart. But I would say for certain that there are several of these diseases that look alike, but may not be alike.”

“Do people take all these kinds from the cows?” Jenner asked.

“I believe so,” Clayton said.

The trip to see Clayton had been more than worth while for Edward Jenner. He had received valuable information.

EIGHT

First Real Experiment

It was June, and Edward Jenner had spent another Saturday afternoon riding from farm to farm, asking about signs of cowpox or indeed any cattle disease that even faintly looked like it. But the search, as usual, had come to nothing.

He was sitting in his office in the early evening, jotting down some notes on a heart case. He had an appointment to visit some friends for a social evening and was already dressed for it. His three-cornered hat lay on the table near him. In a few minutes he would start.

There was a knock. Jenner thought to himself with a rueful smile, A patient!

He opened the door and saw that it was William Farrow, one of the herders of Stoneham Farm. Jenner had come to know him slightly during the many months he had been making inquiries about cowpox. He was about to invite the herder in, but Farrow spoke before Jenner could get the words out.

“Mr. Jenner,” he cried, “knowing that you are interested in cowpox, I have come to tell you our cows have it. I’m sure it’s cowpox.”

Here it was at long last! The cowpox he had been awaiting for so many years. He thanked Farrow, then looked at the man’s hands. There were pustules on them. Farrow said he felt only slightly ill. He had some aching in his body and soreness under his arms.

Jenner asked him to wait, then hurriedly changed into old clothes. He called Henry, his nephew, who had become his helper, and they saddled their horses. In a few minutes they were on the road, with William Farrow following in his cart. Edward Jenner had given up all thought of his social evening. He was confident that his friends would understand his absence.

Stoneham Farm belonged to a well-to-do farmer by the name of Samuel Ruse. When he saw Jenner and his nephew approaching he came out to greet them.

Jenner asked for permission to look at the cows and at everyone who had taken the disease from them.

“Certainly,” said Mr. Ruse. “You’ll have much to see, for a number of my cows have it and it’s spreading to others. Among my people here, William Farrow has taken cowpox, and also two dairymaids have it. I have six other workers—herders and dairymaids—who have shown no sign of it yet, but they may still take it.”

Mr. Ruse led Edward Jenner and young Henry to the cow sheds, and Jenner examined the cows. Here on their udders were the pustules he had so long searched for. He thought they seemed a little like the pustules of smallpox. They had the same swollen redness and pearl-like blisters, but they were paler and slighter. He took out his notebook, wrote down how the pustules looked at various stages of their development, and made drawings of them. His mind was more alert than ever before. He missed nothing.

He then examined the two dairymaids who seemed to have the disease. He looked at their hands and examined the pustules very carefully. Their pustules, like Farrow’s, were similar to those on the cows’ udders. It seemed increasingly clear that humans could, and did, catch the disease from animals. He asked the young women how they felt, and they complained of the same discomforts that the herder had described. They had soreness under the arms, some headache, backache, and slight chills. Both agreed that they were not very sick, however. Jenner wrote all their remarks in his notebook. He took their pulse and temperature. He noted those, too, in the book.

Then he received permission to watch the development of the disease closely as long as it lasted, both in the persons and in the cows.

There followed busy weeks, during which Jenner managed to get to the farm almost every day, no matter how many patients he had. Shortly, two more farm helpers contracted cowpox. Jenner discovered that the workers who caught the disease were those who had cuts and scrapes on the skin of their hands. That, it seemed, was how the pus entered the human body. The disease always started at such points and spread over the hands. In a few cases it spread to other parts of the body.

That might be because these people scratched themselves with their infected hands, Jenner thought.

During these weeks he improved his sketches of the pustules. He colored the drawings, too, showing how the pustules changed in appearance from day to day. The drawings were to be a guide for other surgeons and physicians.

The milkmaids and herders recovered presently, and so did the cows. The whole small epidemic was over in a little more than a month. Jenner continually considered all aspects of the disease, trying to see everything it might mean. Two things stood out most vividly in his thoughts: the cowpox pustule looked much like a smallpox pustule in a mild case; and the other symptoms of cowpox in the human patients were also similar to those of smallpox—soreness under the arms, body aches, abnormal pulse, all were there, but to a lesser degree than in the more serious illness. Could there be an actual relationship between the two diseases—a relationship even closer than he had originally thought? Jenner was finding strong support for this theory.

But now he wanted to make a test, as a first step in actual proof.

Calling together the five Stoneham Farm milkmaids and herders who had suffered the infection, he asked them if they would help him. Would they let him inoculate them with smallpox pus, as was the custom in making people immune to the disease?

“If it is really true,” he said, “that you have been made resistant to smallpox by the cowpox, as you and your fellow farm workers believe, the inoculation won’t take.

On the other hand, if it has not made you resistant and you are still capable of catching smallpox, the inoculation then will give you some smallpox pustules, and you will afterward have the advantage of being safe from the pox. Also, you will have played a valuable part in an experiment I am making.”

The dairymaids and herders all agreed to take the smallpox inoculation. None of them were frightened at its dangers, for each one believed himself immune.

Jenner was fascinated by their calm assurance, and was happy that they were so willing to help in the experiment. Now he must have some pus from an actual smallpox case in order to make the inoculations. He sent a messenger to Gloucester.

The boy brought back several quills containing dried smallpox matter, and the next day Jenner set out for Stoneham Farm. There he inoculated all five of the dairy workers. He made the usual slight scratches on their arms, and put in some of the dried pus.

Every day thereafter, no matter what the weather might be or how busy he was with his regular practice, he drove to the farm to watch his test cases. He watched for a redness, and then the slight, blister-like pustules, the aches and pains. But a week and more passed and nothing at all happened. He kept on watching for another two weeks. Then at last he had some proof that his patients had already been resistant to smallpox when he gave them the inoculations. It had been the cowpox that had made them so, he was sure.

He would make many more tests, of course, but this first one was already so significant, he felt that it would surely interest his fellow surgeons and physicians. Now, with so much to go on, they surely would want to make tests too, and glean further information along with him.

Autumn had come. The trees and shrubs were beginning to turn to many shades of brown and yellow. Hayricks stood out golden-brown against the dull, wintry green of the fields and meadows. It was time for the fall meeting of the medical society. Jenner went there in a state of great eagerness, anxious to share his findings. He arrived a little late. The other twenty surgeons of the county had already had some ale and were quite jovial.

Daniel Ludlow came and patted him affectionately on the back. Jenner wanted to tell him immediately what was on his mind, but before he could start, someone interrupted with more greetings. They all sat down to dinner at the long table. The meal seemed endless to Jenner as he eagerly fingered his notebook and the packet of drawings in his lap.

Then the waitresses cleared the table, and the president of the association started the business session of the meeting. When his initial remarks were finished, he invited anyone who had something of interest to report to speak up. This was Jenner’s opportunity. He arose.

“I believe, my colleagues, you will be interested in the results of the further researches I have been making into a matter which I once before brought to your attention,” he said. “It concerns the curious fact, so long believed a superstition, that cowpox makes a person resistant to smallpox. I know there is not one among you would not give almost anything you possess to conquer that scourge. Now I believe I have proof enough that there is something in cowpox that may lead to this triumph.”

There had been a slight murmur of disapproval at Jenner’s first mention of the word cowpox. He did not pause long enough for anyone to voice that disapproval in a positive way. Depending on the men’s native courtesy to let a speaker finish, Jenner hurriedly went on.

He told them in detail all that he had done, all that he had observed, in the past months. He laid his drawings on the table, explaining what he had learned from studying the pustules of cowpox, and pointing out how remarkably similar they looked to those of smallpox.

He had seen all along the coldness in the faces turned toward him. Now, as he finished, there was an acid silence. Even Ludlow said nothing. His face was sober, but he did not give his thoughts away.

At last, one member of the society arose and jeered at Jenner for thinking that his observations, his tests, could be considered proof. Another gave a short, disgusted laugh because Jenner had called his observations scientific.

Edward Jenner said he thought that further tests should be made. He explained, “Perhaps cowpox is smallpox itself, but modified in the cow. In this mild state, I believe, it can be safely taken by humans and so serves as a protection against smallpox.” He ended by saying that he believed inoculation with cowpox pus would be much safer than with weak smallpox pus, and that it might be the answer to the long search for something to conquer the fearful disease.

This aroused such angry disagreement in the surgeons present that the president had to pound loudly on the table to bring order back to the meeting. Then, one by one, the men were recognized by the president and had their say.

Bitingly one man said that Mr. Jenner must think human beings as lowly as cattle if he thought they actually took a disease from them. “The disease the dairymaids have is of course something quite different. It’s a human disease—has nothing to do with the cows,” he declared.

Some agreed that there was a faint possibility that the dairymaids and herders might have taken the disease from the cows. But all expressed shock and disgust that Jenner wanted actually to take a chance and inoculate human beings with an animal’s disease.

Edward Jenner looked toward Ludlow again. The man still sat there frowning and silent. Jenner steeled himself against all his colleagues and said once more, “I am convinced that inoculation with cowpox will make the human body resistant to smallpox. Gentlemen, I am going to carry forward an experiment to see whether it will so protect people. I had hoped that you would see the importance of this, as I do, and would also make some such experiments.”

At that, one of the surgeons said that he not only disagreed with Jenner in every respect, but that he thought his point of view sacrilegious. He thought further, he said, that surgeons already had troubles enough without getting into this. The poor and even dangerous results of the smallpox inoculations as now in practice had already brought enough disrepute to the medical profession. “It would ill behoove us to start inoculating with an animal’s disease, and getting ourselves laughed and sneered at even more,” he remarked in closing.

Another surgeon jumped to his feet. “My colleague is right,” he said, and added that if Jenner persisted in his point of view he, the surgeon, would have strong doubts as to whether he was fit to practice surgery and medicine.

There were loud expressions of agreement from all sides of the table. The bitterness and anger in the men’s voices rose to a high pitch.

Another surgeon now stood up and said that if Jenner continued his researches along these lines he should be expelled from the county medical association.

Still another man arose. “I move that the members vote to expel Mr. Jenner here and now,” he said.

Jenner could hardly believe this. It was shocking to him that a group of surgeons and physicians could be so set in their ways, so dull in their minds. Didn’t they want to find out new things? Some of them actually seemed to hate him because he was willing to investigate. He had enjoyed the medical society all these years, but this looked like the end of it for him. Certainly he would accept being expelled rather than give up his research.

Dazed as he was by this turn of events, he did not immediately notice that Daniel Ludlow had arisen. It was when the room fell silent and all turned to listen to the older surgeon that Jenner saw him.

“Gentlemen,” Ludlow said, “I must speak in behalf of Mr. Jenner. I do not myself feel that he has as yet produced enough proof to convince me that his theory is right. Yet every man must have the right to study, observe, and investigate whatever interests him. To threaten a man with expulsion for doing that is unconscionable. I am, as you know, a founder of this organization, but I must advise you that should the motion against Edward Jenner be passed, I myself shall resign.” He sat down.

The room remained quiet. For a moment no one had anything to say. Then the president suggested that the man who had made the motion to oust Jenner withdraw it. That was done.

For the remainder of the evening the surgeons were polite to Jenner—but coldly so. The meeting soon broke up. Jenner was deeply disappointed that he could not enlist the aid of his colleagues, and he was saddened by their anger. He spoke to Daniel Ludlow on the way out of the dining room, and thanked him for his defense.

“You deserve to be defended,” Ludlow said. “Besides, it is the principle of the thing that concerns me.”

Edward Jenner had made enemies at the medical association, but at home in the valley of Berkeley he was surrounded by friends. For a long time he did not tell many of these about his research, however. They were not doctors or surgeons, and his investigations did not yet concern them. The whole thing would only puzzle and disturb them. But he did write about his ideas to Hunter and one or two other doctors and surgeons nearby and in London.

He must go on searching for more cases of cowpox, so that he could carry his tests further. The cow disease had died out at the Ruse farm, and there were no signs of it elsewhere. Jenner was again at a standstill.

NINE

Fortunate Days

Emergency calls from sick people did not come every night, of course. But sometimes it seemed as if they came on the very worst nights.

Once when Jenner was riding out to see a sick person during a snowstorm, the cold grew so bitter and the wind so strong that he almost froze to death. He let the horse walk as slowly as it wished in order to make its way safely over the icy surface of the ground. But in spite of his care the animal finally slipped and fell. Jenner jumped clear, and helped the horse up by lumping snow behind its hoofs so that it would have something to push against. Then, with his face and hands almost frozen, he walked ahead of the animal, leading it by the reins.

By the time he arrived at his patient’s house he was in more need of care than the sick person. The people of the house urged him to come in quickly and get warm by the fire in the hearth. But Jenner knew that was dangerous. He went instead into the stable, where his horse had been taken. There he thawed out gradually. Nonetheless, he suffered severe frostbite, from which it took him months to recover. His horse lost part of its hide and had to be put aside for a long time and cared for gently.

But pleasant things happened, too, when Edward Jenner made his calls. Once when he was in the village of Kingscote he met Catherine Kingscote. Her family had lived there for generations, and the village was named after them. Jenner liked her immediately, and in the following months began to call on her socially.

He found that she liked music and poetry, as he did. And they had many other interests in common. She enjoyed hearing of his nature studies and of his work as a surgeon. Both of them liked horses and riding, and they had friends in common. The two never lacked for something to talk about.

Often he brought a book to read to her. It was sometimes poetry—Herrick’s or Lovelace’s. Sometimes he showed her some of his own verses. Often she urged him to bring his violin or flute. Then she accompanied his playing on the spinet.

He wondered why he had not become friendly with a woman for such a long time after his first disappointment in love, years ago. It had been foolish, he now thought. That girl had been so young—only nineteen—and he knew that if he should meet her now he might not find her at all irresistible. He was happy that he had met Catherine Kingscote. He was thirty-nine years old, and told himself that he had been single long enough. He thought he might want to marry Miss Kingscote when he came to know her better. He would wait a while and be sure, of course, and he particularly wanted to be certain that she cared for him.

Jenner was sitting in his dispensary early one afternoon in spring. His last patient had left, and his nephew Henry, now past seventeen, had gone into the other part of the house.

The day had started gray and misty, but the clouds had drifted away and now the sun was out. Jenner longed to go for a walk and see how the birds were progressing with their nest-building. He had been so busy with his cowpox inquiries that he had not watched the birds in the meadows and along the hedgerows for a long time.

He remembered his observations of cuckoos. He would like to carry on this work again. He recalled a letter that had come from John Hunter the week before. There had been a great deal in it about cuckoos. He opened his desk drawer, found the letter, and read it again. What it said was in tune with his thoughts today.

Hunter knew, of course, that Jenner was interested in the cuckoos, for Jenner had sent him many brief reports on them. But Jenner had never found out how they hatched their young. In this letter, Hunter told of a report that he had read in a scientific publication: it was now known that the cuckoos did not build nests of their own. Instead, the females chose several nests built by other birds. In each of these nests a female cuckoo laid one egg, and left it for the foster parents to hatch and raise with their own.

“But here is something to confound us,” Hunter went on. “After the young birds hatch, those belonging to the birds who sat on the nest disappear. I would like to know what becomes of them.” Some naturalists believed, he explained, that the female cuckoo came back and threw all the other young ones out, leaving only her own young cuckoo. She then went off once more and left the foster parents to give their full attention to the little cuckoo.

This was interesting indeed, Edward Jenner thought, but was it true? As Hunter said, no one had ever actually seen female cuckoos pushing young birds from nests. It was purely speculation.

Jenner laid the letter aside. He would certainly like to know the truth. He heard a door opening. His nephew Henry was coming back into the dispensary. His uncle called to him and suggested that they take a few hours off and go into the meadows.

They set out together and, as they walked, Edward Jenner told his nephew about Hunter’s letter and then explained all he knew about cuckoos.

“You must know as much as I about them,” he said, “if you are going to help me with this bit of nature study.

“The cuckoos leave this damp, chill climate in the winter. We do not know where those from this area go, but it is certainly southwest, for they are seen in warmer places in winter. In spring they return. The males, flying in large flocks, come late in March or very early in April. This much I have found out from my many years of past observations. A little later, about mid-April, the females arrive in smaller flocks. You must listen and learn their calls, Henry. The female’s is different from the male’s.”

Then he described the cuckoo’s appearance, so that the boy could recognize it. “It is that large bird that we often see hereabouts—eleven to fourteen inches long from its head to the tip of its long, slender, rounded tail. It is a dull gray in color, with whitish legs and belly—the white being crossed by wavering lines of red-brown. And it has a curved beak. It seldom sits still, except when asleep, but hops continually from branch to branch and tree to tree.”

There was the farm of Edward Jenner’s aunt, Mrs. Hooper, about five miles away, where there was an abundance of birds. Jenner and his nephew set out for this spot. At last they left the road and skirted a hayfield in which the grass was still low, but brightly green. They came to Mrs. Hooper’s house and stopped to greet her. Then they went on, crossing another meadow.

The nephew could see why they had come to this particular place. There were birds everywhere—birds of many kinds. He had never seen such large numbers of them in any other place around the valley of Berkeley.

The earth now became marshy, so that they stopped and changed into their high boots, then tramped on over wet and soft ground, skirting the swamp. Birds whistled, chirped, and warbled all about them. Others cried raucously, sounding an alarm as Jenner and his nephew passed close to a bush or tree where a nest held eggs or young.

They saw multitudes of birds, and not a single cuckoo. Henry spoke his disappointment at this lack, but his uncle was not worried.

“They are unsociable, wary birds,” he said. “If we keep very quiet for a long while, they’ll come out of the trees and shrubs where they are hiding.”

They stood still. Edward Jenner kept his spyglasses trained on a clump of young trees. His nephew began to wriggle and move his feet, and Jenner whispered to him to keep quiet.

After another minute or so, the uncle whispered again, and pointed.

A cuckoo had flown onto a long branch, where it was clearly in view. Now it hopped to a lower limb, then to a higher one.

Gently, moving as little as possible, Edward Jenner handed his nephew the glasses and asked him to try to memorize every detail of the cuckoo, so that he would recognize one when he saw it again. He explained that this one was a male, and that he would show Henry a female when he could.

“Both must be watched,” he said softly, “for we do not know which of them throws young birds from the nests—if, indeed, either does.”

They kept watching, and later saw a female cuckoo and several more males.

They saw a hedge sparrow’s nest with eggs in it. Since neither the male nor the female bird was there, Jenner and his nephew could look into the nest. The sparrows returned a moment later and scolded excitedly at the sight of the two humans. Jenner and his nephew moved away, for they had already seen what they were looking for: one of the eggs in the nest looked different from the others.

“Probably a cuckoo’s egg,” said Jenner. He marked of Mr. Jenner. I do not myself feel that he has as yet produced enough proof to convince me that his theory is right. Yet every man must have the right to study, observe, and investigate whatever interests him. To threaten a man with expulsion for doing that is unconscionable. I am, as you know, a founder of this organization, but I must advise you that should the motion against Edward Jenner be passed, I myself shall resign.” He sat down.

the tree so that they could come back and see what might happen in this nest during the following weeks.

They looked further, but today they found no other nests that interested them. Edward Jenner checked the time on his watch, and the two started for home.

After that, Jenner and Henry often came out to the marshy meadow behind the Hooper farm. Sometimes Jenner’s other nephew, George, came, too. Sometimes, instead, they went to another farm where there were also great numbers of birds.

Sometimes Jenner and the two boys set out early in the morning and did not return home till lunchtime. Often they laid out their old clothes and walking shoes before going to church on Sundays. After services they changed quickly, picked up their rubber boots and spyglasses and a lunch, and were on their way.

One day, when they were knee-deep in the marsh, they saw, fastened to the reeds, a little reed warbler’s nest that also contained what looked like a cuckoo’s egg. This place they marked, too. Jenner wondered at the remarkable thing he saw here: the cuckoo’s egg in this nest was different from the cuckoos’ eggs he had seen in other birds’ nests. It was as though nature helped the cuckoo with its tricks by changing its eggs slightly to match more closely those in the foster home. Could this be? It must be studied further.

Jenner longed to see a nest almost immediately after the cuckoo had laid her egg in it, and at last he did. On a branch he saw a female cuckoo—a little darker than the male. She was watching a certain spot in the low trees. Jenner knew there was a wagtail’s nest there, with five eggs in it. He had seen it only an hour or so before.

Now, as he watched, the wagtail flew off, and immediately after that the cuckoo flew to this spot. Jenner waited for quite a while—until the cuckoo came out and flew away. Then he went to the nest. The wagtail was back and ready to sit on her nest, but for a moment Jenner kept her away. He must see what had happened. There, in the nest, were six eggs instead of only five—and one looked a little different from the others. Now he was not merely guessing about the cuckoo’s egg. He had practically seen the cuckoo lay it there.

Henry and George found more hedge sparrows’ nests where the mother bird was already sitting on her eggs, and marked these bushes or trees. A day later, Jenner and Henry found an extra egg in some of these nests. More cuckoo eggs. They saw that these cuckoo eggs did not resemble those of the sparrows. The bird watchers began to wait for all the eggs in these nests to hatch.

When they had counted off the right number of days, they went out again to check their nests. The first morning, they found that the young in one nest were out of their shells. And they saw that one of the little naked, squawking birds was larger than the others. That would be the cuckoo.

Now Jenner watched even more carefully every day. It was fortunate that there was no outbreak of serious illness and that he could take time for his cuckoos without neglecting any of his patients. Usually he did his observing between dawn and breakfast time. And on days when he expected few patients and wanted to take some extra time in the fields and marshes, Eleanor and Stephen took messages for him from those people who wanted him to call later at their homes.

He walked, rode, drove, and worked so hard that he was quite tired all the time during that spring and summer. But nothing must stop him now from following the young cuckoos through the nestling stage.

The mother and father hedge sparrows, wagtails, and reed warblers were busy finding food for their young. Since they were away from their nests much of the time, observing the young was not difficult.

Jenner’s eyes, his mind, took in every detail of the young cuckoos—their nakedness, well after the other young birds already had some pinfeathers, their bristly look, their great and constant hunger. By pushing their big bodies up above those of the smaller birds when the foster parents came with food, they always got plenty to eat.

Then, one day, Jenner noticed that the young cuckoos in the several hedge sparrows’ nests he was watching seemed to have a slight depression in their backs. This hollow seemed odd to him. He had never seen it in an adult cuckoo, and he had handled many a dead one, during all the years when he had been trapping and examining them and sending some to Hunter.

A day later he was surprised to see a baby cuckoo in a wagtail’s nest make use of this depression. As Jenner and Henry watched, the young cuckoo worked itself around in the nest. Pushing with its rump and wings, it at last shoved itself under one of the young wagtails. It cradled the nestling in the hollow in its back, then pushed it against the side of the nest and upward. With a final heave it lifted the wagtail over the side and out.

The baby wagtail lay on the ground and screamed in terror. Edward Jenner and Henry would have liked to help it, but the uncle reminded Henry why they were there.

“We are observers,” he said. “We must not interfere with nature if we want to study it.”

For several more days they watched this nest and those of the hedge sparrows and reed warblers. Day by day, they found another and another young bird gone from each nest, until finally only the young cuckoos were left. Now these birds received all the food their foster parents brought, and they grew fast. The adult cuckoos never came back to look after their young ones in any way.

Jenner discovered something else. In the nests of a few birds the young cuckoo did not get rid of its nest-mates. Perhaps, he thought, this happened when the young birds were of a kind strong enough to withstand the cuckoo nestling.

He made an experiment one day. Into a nest where the young cuckoo was the only young bird left, he put an egg from another bird’s nest. Immediately the young cuckoo set to work to push it out as he had done with the young birds. He would not allow anything in the nest with him, if he could possibly remove it.

Now Edward Jenner had the full answer to the question that had troubled and puzzled Hunter and other naturalists. Definitely the adult cuckoos had nothing to do with dropping young birds out of the nest, as had been believed. The young ones did it.

Jenner had been keeping ample notes on the behavior of cuckoos. Now he wrote to Hunter telling him of his findings.

In a few days’ time—much quicker than Edward Jenner expected—a reply came. Hunter wrote that Jenner’s discovery about the cuckoos was so important that it must not be neglected. Jenner must write a paper describing his entire observations. This paper must be shown to the Royal Society.

“Your friend, Joseph Banks, is now president of the society, as you no doubt know,” he wrote, “and I myself will submit your paper to him.”

So Jenner took some time off from his practice and, with his copious notes before him, began to write. Some weeks later his paper was finished and he sent it to John Hunter. That done, his evenings were free and he had more time to give to Catherine Kingscote again. Of this he was very glad.

TEN

Small Steps Forward

Edward Jenner began to think seriously about asking Catherine Kingscote to be his wife. But he hesitated, remembering how he once had been turned down by another young woman. Besides, he was again working on his smallpox-cowpox investigations. He wondered whether Catherine would like to be married to a busy surgeon who was absorbed with such studies.

Meanwhile, he received a letter from Hunter, complimenting him on his paper on the cuckoo. Soon after that, another letter arrived. It was from Joseph Banks—now Sir Joseph Banks—of the Royal Society, and brought news that Edward Jenner’s observations were so unusual, so against everything that had been reported and believed previously, that the members of the society felt that they could not accept the paper immediately. Sir Joseph asked whether Jenner would make further studies of cuckoos, and rewrite or expand his paper. If Jenner should do this satisfactorily, the Royal Society would be very much interested in publishing the paper.

Jenner found this quite reasonable. To his mind, one could never study and observe too much. He was very sure of the information he had gathered so far, but he knew he would find something else of interest. He was soon off to the fields and meadows and marshes again, watching the curious birds.

He found more proof to support his belief that when generations of cuckoos have laid eggs in the nest of one kind of bird, the choice becomes inherited. He noticed that there was some difference in the appearance of the eggs of these cuckoos, but the eggs never looked like the hosts’ eggs. And there were other new details about eggs, young, and adults.

In the winter of 1788, Jenner asked Catherine Kingscote to marry him. She accepted happily. Their wedding was set for March 6.

Jenner had been working on the revision of his paper on cuckoos. The new material he had gathered supported what he had written before. He did not change his article, but merely added to it. When it was finished, he sent it to the Royal Society. Shortly thereafter, he received a letter from the president of the society, saying that the group of naturalists who had read the paper were now completely convinced that Jenner was correct in his observations and conclusions. The paper was to be published immediately. The letter ended by saying that Edward Jenner had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society because of his remarkable contribution.

Being a modest man, Jenner was quite astounded at the honor. When he told Catherine about it, she laughed at him affectionately and said that she was not at all surprised—it was what she had expected.

March of 1788 came, and Edward Jenner and Catherine Kingscote were married in Stephen’s church. Jenner had bought a Georgian house not far from the village of Berkeley and they went there to live. While Catherine completed the furnishing and decorating of the interior, Jenner planned the lawns and gardens. His friend the clergyman, Mr. Ferryman, who was interested in landscape gardening, came over often and planned with him.

Jenner planted several kinds of young forest trees on his grounds, so that they set each other off by their contrasting foliage. He had stone walls built around his place, and planted clematis, creepers, and ivy to grow over them. He broke the straight lines of the walls with occasional arches, and he had groups of bushes placed here and there so that they added further to the beauty of the grounds. All along the walls a path was made so that he and his wife could take pleasant strolls around their place. Roses and laurel were planted along its sides.

Jenner loved developing his grounds, and in his free hours he worked with the gardeners. Even when he was busy in his dispensary, he took a moment off now and then to watch the workmen planting, trimming, and cutting. Or he pointed out some pleasant detail to one of his patients.

All the while, Jenner kept inquiring at the dairy farms for any trace of cowpox, but continued to receive the same answer: there was none.

In 1788 Jenner took his drawings of cowpox pustules to London and showed them to Sir E. Home, Hunter, and a few others. All were skeptical or downright shocked by Jenner’s contention that there might be a relation between the cow disease and smallpox in humans. Only Hunter was interested and encouraging. Jenner returned to Berkeley to struggle on with his idea.

His nephew Henry, nearly twenty, still worked with him, but now as an assistant surgeon. Each day, Henry came riding over from Eleanor and Stephen’s. Later he came to live with his uncle, for in this way he could be of more use. Again, whenever their medical practice allowed, Jenner and Henry spent many hours in the fields and woods. And now Jenner studied the migrations of birds, too.

At various times, news came from John Hunter. In 1778 the Royal Society had published an important paper of his on dental diseases. In 1785 he performed a new and successful operation on a diseased artery, for which he was admired by surgeons and physicians all over Europe.

Hunter was living in Leicester Square now, and his zoological museum was in a special building behind his house. He had been appointed surgeon-extraordinary to the king, and some time after the artery operation he was made surgeon-general to the army.

Meanwhile, Jenner was continuing his observations and careful study of a number of diseases, taking notes on them. Among them were heart diseases about which almost nothing was known, and tuberculosis, in which he had become especially interested because several of Hunter’s sisters and brothers had died of it. But in the field of Jenner’s greatest interest, the study of the possible prevention of smallpox, he seemed for a while to be completely at a standstill. There were no cases of cowpox to make tests with—and further tests were absolutely necessary. He was restless about this, and discontented.

Early in the spring of 1789 the Jenners’ first child, a boy, was born. His parents called him Edward, after his father. John Hunter was named his godfather. The baby was a delight to his parents. Altogether, marriage was a fine thing, Jenner thought, and having a son made life richer still.

One autumn morning, in the course of keeping his constant check on the farms in order to watch for cowpox, Jenner drove to William Brown’s place.

Had there been any cowpox? he asked.

Brown said no.

Jenner asked if it was possible that some other farm animals besides cows might have a similar disease.

Yes, replied the farmer. Swine did, and there were cases in the valley at this time. He could take Jenner to see some of them at Marlowe’s farm, not far away.

Edward Jenner thanked him, and the two set out together. At Marlowe’s farm, Jenner examined the pigs and found that the eruptions on their underbellies were almost exactly like those on cows.

He was soon off for home, feeling elated because now he could go on with another angle of his study. He would examine swine-pox minutely.

It was November, and his son Edward was a healthy baby about one year and a half old when news of another outbreak of smallpox was brought to Jenner by a farmer. At nearby Wotton-under-Edge where Edward Jenner had once as a small boy gone to school briefly, several young children had come down with the disease. Two of them had died almost before their parents had recognized what it was.

Edward and Catherine worried about the people of their community. And, in addition, they had their own small son to worry about. They were particularly afraid, because they knew that his father would have to take care of smallpox cases as the disease spread to their village and countryside. He might easily carry the infection to little Edward.

Smallpox did spread quickly, and soon there were nearby cases. Edward Jenner came home after hearing the latest news of the epidemic, and went into his dispensary. There he stood long at the window, looking out and worrying about his child. He wished more than ever that his theory about cowpox was further advanced. Then, desperately, he thought that if only there were some cases of cowpox he would perhaps inoculate his baby. He believed in the inoculation, and he felt that his child might be safer if he had it.

It came to his mind then that the swine-pox which farmers Brown and Marlowe had shown him might serve for an inoculation, instead. But no, that was as yet entirely untested. And surely Catherine would be even more shocked at that idea than at the thought of a cowpox inoculation. He leaned against the window frame, deeply troubled.

The door opened. He turned and saw Catherine come in, her face drawn with worry. He was amazed and relieved when she herself mentioned the cowpox inoculation, and suggested that they should try it on their child.

Touched by her confidence, he put his arm about her and explained that at present there was no cowpox, and that only the related swine-pox pus was available.

“Try it,” she said. “What great difference can there be whether one kind of beast has it or another?”

Jenner was eager to try it. Immediately he had his horse saddled and rode out to Marlowe’s farm. There, with his lancet, he cut one of the pustules on the underbelly of a pig and took from it as much of the liquid as the point of his instrument would hold. He put the lancet into a clean bottle and closed it with a stopper.

Back home, he found Catherine waiting. She had heard the hoofbeats of his horse as he approached. They ate dinner in silence, both praying silently that they had decided to do the right thing.

Catherine brought the baby down to the dispensary the next day, and there Edward Jenner inoculated him with the swine-pox pus. It was the first time a human being had been so inoculated, and Jenner watched the results with intense interest and concern—first, for love of his child; second, for the sake of all humanity. It was another step forward in the test of his theory. On it hung a great deal.

Several times every day Jenner looked at the scratches he had made on his child’s arm. By the eighth day, small pustules had developed, but only where Jenner had made the scratches. They looked somewhat like both the cowpox and swine-pox pustules Jenner had examined so thoroughly. The little boy ran a slight fever. This was just what Jenner had hoped for, because it meant that the inoculation was taking effect.

 The child was entirely over it the next day, and Jenner feared then that the inoculation had been of no use,after all. As he knew from his examination of the dairymaids’ and herders’ cowpox, the slight fever should have lasted several days longer.

There was only one way to find out whether the swine-pox had set up a protection in the baby, and that was to inoculate him with smallpox now. This thought troubled Jenner. If the baby was not immune, he might become quite sick, as Jenner well knew from his own childhood experience.

But he went ahead with the smallpox inoculation, and to his delight found that it did not cause any infection at all—not even redness. It seemed then that the swine pox actually had set up a resistance in the baby.

Jenner was overjoyed for his child’s sake, and he was excited by the possibility that lay ahead for inoculations. Still, he must not jump at conclusions. To be certain, he must try such inoculations on many more people, young and old. After all, there was a chance that young Edward was naturally resistant.

Besides, in order to go on, Jenner must now wait for an outbreak of cowpox, for it was this disease that he had studied so long and knew most about. The cases of pox in swine soon disappeared, moreover, and he did not even have these to work with.

He preferred working with cowpox in any case. He was going to follow a slightly different method. What he wanted was a dairymaid or herder with cowpox pustules on his hands. He would take the pus from some of these infections to inoculate healthy people with. He would see whether they might in this manner contract a slight case of cowpox and become immune to smallpox. It would be necessary to make the test not once or twice, but many times, before it could be considered successful.

Jenner was so excited by the results of inoculation in his own child that at the next meeting of the medical society he could not keep from talking about the subject of using animal-pox serum. The surgeons and physicians there, however, still resisted the idea. They realized that they could not get Jenner dropped from the society, but they jeered at him. Ludlow again came to Jenner’s defense, but Jenner begged him to ignore the insults.

For years after inoculating his own small child, Jenner was at a standstill with his experiments. In that time many things happened. Jenner’s nephew, Henry, became a full-fledged surgeon with an office of his own in the nearby town of Stroud. Soon afterward he married.

Something important to Jenner’s career happened, too. John Hunter recommended him to St. Andrew’s University in Scotland, asking that they give this exceptional surgeon and medical man a doctor’s degree. In 1792 this was granted. Jenner now had the right to the title of doctor as well as surgeon.

John Hunter had long ago written Jenner about certain severe pains he sometimes felt, although he did not know their cause. Jenner corresponded with him on the subject, asking Hunter to describe more of his symptoms. From the descriptions, Jenner analyzed correctly that Hunter had a bad heart. In October, 1793, Jenner received a letter from Hunter’s wife, telling him of his old and much-loved friend’s death.

Hunter had become enraged during an argument with his over-conservative colleagues at St. George’s Hospital, and his heart attack had been the direct result of his emotional upset. That temper of his, which always had made trouble for him, now had ended his life. Edward Jenner knew that with a heart in as bad shape as Hunter’s was, however, his friend could not have lived much longer anyway. In a time when so little was known about the treatment of faulty hearts, nothing could have been done for him.

Edward and Catherine Jenner’s life went on quietly. When their first child was about three years old, they had a second one—a daughter, this time. She was named for her mother.

Jenner saw his nephew Henry quite often. The two remained devoted to each other. Henry still went on tramps with his uncle, to watch birds and other animals. And Henry kept his ears open for news of cowpox for his uncle.

In the autumn of 1795, Henry’s wife and sister fell ill with typhus. Jenner, the devoted relative and friend, rode over to take care of them. After weeks of care, Henry and Edward Jenner were able to bring Henry’s wife, Jane, and her sister safely back to health. Both of the men seemed to remain in good condition.

Edward Jenner, returning from a sick call soon after this, felt very tired as he rode along. The past weeks had been exhausting. He longed for a good night’s rest. By the time he arrived at the house, however, he knew that he was not only tired, but also ill. He had caught typhus.

For two weeks Edward Jenner was very ill. His friends Mr. Hicks, Dr. Parry, and Daniel Ludlow came and took care of him. And his nephew George, now a minister, arrived. He stayed and looked after his uncle loyally, day by day. There were times when they thought Edward Jenner might not live. But he pulled through. After he was out of danger, he was eager to take up his practice again, but he was too weak. All through that winter he stayed in bed or in his big armchair. Finally, when spring came, he began to feel the first touch of rising strength.

Almost his first concern was the cowpox. Was anyone watching for it? he asked. Did anyone know if there was even a slight case of it on one of the many dairy farms?

He was horrified when his wife told him that there had been an outbreak of it while he was ill. With the disease as rare as it was nowadays, it might not occur again in his lifetime, he feared. It was terrible news.

He started to pick up his practice, but at first could work only slowly and briefly. After another month or so, however, his former strength returned.

Meanwhile, in November, his third child was born, rounding out his family to two boys and a girl.

ELEVEN

Achievement and Trouble

Edward Jenner had hardly been aware of how interested the farm folk were in his investigation of cowpox. For, ordinarily, they talked about it only among themselves, seldom to him.

He was surprised when Mrs. John Phipps, a woman who lived a little distance down the road from him, came to see him one morning, bringing her eight-year-old son, Jamie.

The boy, she confided to Dr. Jenner, was sickly. She was terrified that she would lose him the next time there was a smallpox outbreak.

Edward Jenner thought that she wanted him to give Jamie the usual smallpox inoculation. But Mrs. Phipps quickly explained that she would never let Jamie have that, for her older son had died of such an inoculation a few years before.

What she wanted, she explained, was to have Jamie inoculated with cowpox. She had heard about Jenner’s experiments and believed in them.

Edward Jenner was amazed. “You are very courageous,” he said. “You know, don’t you, that most people—even surgeons—do not believe there is anything to my theory? Some even think it dangerous, and others think it sacrilegious.”

Mrs. Phipps stated her disagreement with these ideas.

Dr. Jenner warned her that he had not yet been able to make enough tests to prove his theory completely, and so could not recommend the inoculation. Besides, there was no cowpox in the neighborhood at that time. In order to give Jamie an inoculation, the doctor must have the liquid from a cow’s pustule or, better still, from an infected dairymaid’s or herder’s hand. Mrs. Phipps might have to wait quite a while before that liquid was obtainable.

Mrs. Phipps said she would wait as long as necessary, but wished the doctor to remember her and Jamie as soon as there was cowpox.

Dr. Jenner smiled and promised he would. He would gladly give the inoculation to Jamie, he said, and the boy, in taking it, would play a part in an event that Dr. Jenner believed would be important to all the world.

By good fortune, cowpox broke out on the Prewitt’s farm soon after that, in May, 1796. Edward Jenner could hardly believe his luck. Now he had both the needed pus and a volunteer. His long wait was at an end.

He hurried immediately to the farm to look things over, and found several workers who had already caught the disease from the cows. He talked to the milkmaids about what he wanted to do, and asked whether one of them would let him take some pus from her hands. A young woman by the name of Sarah Nelmes volunteered quickly.

Jenner thanked her and asked her to come to his dispensary the next morning. She promised to be there. On his way back home, Jenner found a farm boy to take a message to Mrs. Phipps. The message was, “Bring Jamie to me tomorrow morning, and I will inoculate him.”

All three—Sarah Nelmes, Mrs. Phipps, and Jamie—were at the dispensary the next day. Dr. Jenner rolled up Jamie’s sleeve, and talked to the three people as he worked.

He scratched the boy’s arm with a clean lancet, then touched the open scratch with the point of a lancet holding pus from Sarah Nelmes’s pustule. Then Jenner rolled up Jamie’s other sleeve and inoculated him on that arm, too.

“To make sure it takes,” he explained.

It had not hurt Jamie, and the boy stared at the scratches on his arms in wonder. From all the talk he had heard about this inoculation he knew it was important.

The doctor put clean linen over the scratches. “Now we’re finished,” he said. He gave Jamie a penny for neither making a fuss nor whimpering. The boy looked at it with a wide smile, then put the treasure into his pocket.

Dr. Jenner thanked Sarah Nelmes for helping in the inoculation, and her rosy face flushed with pride.

Jamie’s mother asked what she should do for Jamie in the next few days. The surgeon told her the boy would need no special care. But, since Jenner wanted to study the results, he asked her if she would please bring the boy to him once every day. Mrs. Phipps promised to do this. She thanked him again and went home with Jamie.

The doctor went on about his work. There was a call to be made in the village of Berkeley, and later more patients to see at his dispensary. Toward evening he thought he heard a disturbance in front of his house. Beyond the lawn and its wall he could see several young men and boys standing in the road. He recognized them as rough young people from the village. His wife came into the room and stood beside him.

“I’m afraid of them,” she said. “They look threatening. Do you think they’re here because of the cowpox inoculation you gave Jamie Phipps?”

That was exactly what Edward Jenner did think, but he had no wish to frighten his wife. He tried to sound convincing as he remarked that the boys might just be loitering, in the way idle young people sometimes did. But his wife could see through his outer calm.

He turned abruptly away and went to the front door of the house. “Off with you!” he said to the loiterers.

The young men stopped muttering. One said, “Good day, Mr. Jenner.” There was some hushed conversation among them, then they went away.

Later that evening the same thing happened, but the crowd that gathered was larger this time. There were twelve or more young men. When Jenner went to the door to tell them to leave, they laughed at him. Some made motions around their heads to show that they thought he was out of his mind. Others called out, “Cow doctor!”

Jenner longed to go out with a cane and drive them away. But that would be foolish, he knew, and he gave up the idea.

A rock came crashing through a window.

Jenner shouted to the young men to leave at once.

There was a dead silence outdoors.

Nothing further happened that night, but Edward Jenner and his wife were distinctly uneasy as they went to bed. He protested his sorrow that she should be exposed to this trouble.

“Your idea is too important to be set aside,” she told him. “Your experiments must go on. We’ll have to see this through as best we may.”

He lay awake part of that night, worrying. The next day he and his wife warned the children’s nurse not to take the little ones out beyond the walls of the grounds. They were to play only at the rear of the house, away from the road, and the nurse must stay with them at all times. If any trouble arose, she was to bring them into the house instantly.

Jenner, carrying a heavy cane, rode into the village after breakfast. He reported the loiterers and the breaking of his window to the town magistrate, Squire Parsons. Parsons pretended that Jenner was giving him no case against the boys.

“I can do nothing,” he said.

Edward Jenner knew then that the rough, ignorant boys were not the only ones who were against him. He rode home holding his cane tightly.

The rowdies were there again, but when they saw how determined and angry Jenner looked, they did not come near him.

Reaching his dispensary, he found that Mrs. Phipps had arrived with Jamie. The woman and the boy came every day now, as they had promised, no matter how the young loiterers before the house jeered and threatened. Dr. Jenner was able to watch Jamie’s inoculation carefully. It developed just as it should. On the third day there were red spots on the boy’s arms, where the scratches had been made. These grew larger on succeeding days and became typical cowpox pustules. But the child did not get them on any other part of his body. Now Jamie had a slight chill, fever and headache, and soreness under his arms.

Jenner took down notes about it all. In just the time he expected, the pustules dried up and Jamie was well again.

He told Mrs. Phipps that in a few weeks he would give Jamie the regular smallpox inoculation. If it did not take effect, then they could be certain that the doctor’s theory was correct and that the boy was now resistant to the disease.

The town rowdies still came out to the house daily, but they had done no one any bodily harm. Catherine and Edward Jenner were beginning to accept their presence and fear them a little less. Mrs. Jenner was amazed at how firmly and boldly her husband rode out past them whenever he went on a sick call. Both the doctor and his wife hoped the young toughs would weary of their loitering and give up after a while. Already there were a few less every day.

Then one evening three solemn adults from the town called on Dr. Jenner. They said they had been appointed by the other villagers to speak to him.

“We fear you are risking the health and well-being of the community,” their leader, Mr. Pennypacker, said.

Dr. Jenner protested that his experiments were based on a sound study he had made, and that they were not dangerous.

“Other doctors tell us otherwise,” said Mr. Penny-packer. “People are not animals, and should not be given animals’ diseases.”

“But cowpox is not an animal’s disease alone. It may be related to smallpox. Milkmaids and herders take it, You must have heard that long ago in this dairy area,” Jenner replied.

They were silent and stony-faced.

“I myself have succeeded in passing it from one person to another,” Jenner went on. “It is—”

“You are wrong in doing this!” Mr. Pennypacker said. “Other surgeons agree with us that you are doing a dangerous thing. They say that in inoculating with cowpox you may be spreading a new and terrible disease among humans.”

“It might become as bad or worse than smallpox,” said another man of the delegation nervously.

“We must insist that you stop what you are doing,” said Mr. Pennypacker.

Edward Jenner was distressed that he could not make these men see the value of what he was attempting. He tried once more, but met again with stubbornness and a determination to cling to their ignorance. He gave up, and showed them to the door.

The delegation was angry. Mr. Pennypacker threatened, “We will find a way to stop you, Mr. Jenner.”

Soon after that, a printed leaflet was circulated from house to house in the village, and in the marketplace. It read: Attention all residents! Do you wish your innocent offspring to take on the physical and mental attributes of a cow? It went on to say that this was the danger in the practices of Dr. Edward Jenner. Furthermore the surgeon was spreading a “foul and loathsome” disease from the cows, and such inoculation was in no way a protection against smallpox, as Dr. Jenner claimed.

In disgust and dismay, Jenner and his wife discussed the leaflet.

Mrs. Jenner lamented that the people were trying to stop her husband from making a lifesaving discovery, and that they would ruin his reputation in order to do this. Why wouldn’t they even give his investigations a chance, when they needed them so badly?

Edward Jenner sadly shook his head. Ignorance and fear of the new were hard to conquer, he said.

And he felt depressed. He and Catherine spent a disturbed and restless night. He had been a surgeon and doctor in the valley for twenty-five years. Now his career might be ruined, and at an end.

After breakfast the next morning they again heard the murmur of many voices from the road. Cautiously they looked out the front windows and saw that a bigger crowd than ever had gathered. This time it was made up almost entirely of the doctor’s own patients—people he had taken care of in illness for years.

Have these turned against me, too? Jenner asked himself.

Someone in the crowd saw Dr. Jenner at the window and pointed him out to the others. In a moment a roar went up.

“Dr. Jenner!” and, “Our good doctor!”

There was much shouting, but it was not hostile.

Jenner’s patients were supporting him and making a public demonstration of their trust in him.

Edward and Catherine Jenner went to the door and threw it wide open.

“Thank you,” Dr. Jenner called out over the noise. “Thank you, my good neighbors.”

They greeted him with another cheerful, affectionate roar.

This show of faith on the part of Dr. Jenner’s patients seemed to have a good effect on the whole community. The attacks of the sober delegations as well as of the rowdies came less frequently, and then stopped. A wonderful peace descended on the Jenner household, and the doctor went about making his sick calls more comfortably.

Jamie Phipps was feeling fine again. He was entirely over the mild effects of the cowpox inoculation. Dr. Jenner waited another two weeks or so, then on July 1, 1796, with Mrs. Phipps’s approval, he gave the boy an inoculation with the dried liquid from a smallpox pustule. He was sure now that he was running no risk. And he was right: the smallpox inoculation did not take effect. Jamie had been made resistant by the cowpox inoculation.

Mrs. Phipps was very happy. Even more so was Edward Jenner. He was at last certain that he had discovered a way to stop the dreaded smallpox.

More tests would have to be made before he could fully convince other people. Many doctors, as well as ordinary people, would hold out against him for a while longer, he knew. But in time the weight of the truth would surely win them over.

He needed a supply of cowpox pus for more inoculations, and went to the Prewitt farm where some of the cows still had the disease. This time he took along dozens of quills, such as had long been used for keeping smallpox pus for inoculations. He dipped the quills into the pustules he broke, then wrapped them in clean white lint. Carefully he stored them in his dispensary.

As soon as he could find the time, he rode over to see Daniel Ludlow. The two men sat down together and talked, and Jenner told his old friend the whole story of his recent investigations and his test inoculation.

Daniel Ludlow was cordial. Jenner had convinced him of the correctness of his theory, Ludlow declared. And he added that Jenner had made a great discovery for which the world would one day be grateful.

Edward Jenner then handed him two of the quills wrapped in lint and told him what they held. He asked his friend to make inoculations with them, write up his notes, and join Jenner in reporting the discovery to the Royal Society.

But Ludlow would not do that. He had not helped Jenner with the experiments when they had been difficult, he protested, and he did not wish to take part of the credit now.

“You defended me before the county medical society,” Jenner reminded him.

“That much any intelligent man should have done,” Ludlow answered. Then he asked, “How long have you believed in this, and worked to prove your theory?”

“Twenty years and more,” said Jenner.

“That is a long time to work alone and keep up courage and faith in an idea,” Ludlow said admiringly.

Edward Jenner next wrote a long letter to Sir Joseph Banks, who was still president of the Royal Society, telling him in detail about his discovery. Sir Joseph answered that he knew nothing of medicine, and had therefore talked to some of the medical men who were Fellows of the society. They did not believe Jenner was right in his findings, he reported. Banks suggested that the doctor have his paper printed privately, and send it himself to leaders in medicine and surgery.

Jenner decided to take this advice, and began work on his paper. Meanwhile he went on experimenting with cowpox inoculations.

He gave free inoculations to all his patients who wanted them. Most of them accepted the treatment. As usual, he kept records of each case and studied the development of each. As he accumulated more experience he refined his methods. He discovered what he considered the best means of testing a patient’s immunity to smallpox, and he found out how to keep a supply of dried cowpox pus. If one stored the quills in tightly closed jars, he found, the material kept better.

Cowpox had never had a scientific medical description, and had no Latin medical name. Jenner devised one: Variolae vaccinae, which means “smallpox of the cow.”

In 1798, he finished his paper on cowpox inoculation. He inserted his cowpox drawings in the right places and looked the whole thing over with satisfaction. He had meant to write only a small pamphlet, but it had become quite a manuscript and would be a thick booklet. He entitled it, An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of Variolae Vaccinae, a Disease Discovered in Some of the Western Counties of England, Particularly Gloucestershire, and Known by the Name of the Cowpox.

The next day he wrote to Sampson Low, a fine London printer he had selected, and asked if he could undertake the printing. “I will send it by the post as soon as you advise me,” Jenner wrote.

Instead of sending it, however, he and Catherine finally decided to take the manuscript to Low in person. In that way they would be sure it arrived safely. Jenner would be able to talk to the printer about the way he would like it set up, and he could read and correct the proof there. In any case, a visit to London was not a bad idea, they thought. In London, Jenner would have the chance to talk to a number of city surgeons and physicians about his cowpox vaccine, and so prepare the way for its acceptance.

Edward Jenner and his wife went over to the rectory the next evening. They sat in Stephen’s comfortable old study, and the doctor told his brother and Eleanor what he had in mind. He asked Stephen’s opinion of the plan. Did Stephen think the trip was worth taking?

Yes, said Stephen, he would advise his brother to go. He needed support from well-known doctors. Stephen and Eleanor volunteered to take care of the Jenner children and their nurse while the doctor and his wife were away. Catherine thanked them. She decided, however, that she would take her daughter along. Next day she wrote her sister in London about the journey that was planned, and asked if they should stay with her. Edward wrote to Anne Hunter. He knew she would want to see him and Catherine, too. And he wrote to other people in the big city, and also to Daniel Ludlow.

Soon he had a reply from Ludlow, who reminded Jenner that he must see Mr. Cline while he was in London. This was the surgeon Jenner had already briefly corresponded with some time ago.

Catherine’s sister answered, saying they must of course come to stay with her. And Anne Hunter wrote that she counted on a visit from them.

Soon after that, Edward Jenner and his wife and daughter left for London. The doctor’s manuscript and illustrations were well wrapped and securely tucked under his arm. The jars containing the quills of lymph were in a box which he and Catherine kept close beside them in the carriage to make sure no harm came to it.

It was early spring, 1798, and still cool weather. Mists hung low over the meadows and woods where the first leaf buds were beginning to show. The roads, rough and often muddy, were almost entirely empty of other vehicles. Only an occasional farm cart could be seen as they drove along.

TWELVE

London Journey

As Edward Jenner and his wife rode through the crowded, noisy streets of London, memories of the past came crowding in on the doctor. The changes since his long stay here as a young man were many. The cries of the vendors still sounded much like those he had known when he had studied with John Hunter, however. Jenner pointed out things of interest to his wife, taking pleasure in sharing his recollections with her.

They went to Catherine’s sister’s, where they dined that night. The next morning Jenner took a carriage to Soho to see the printer, Sampson Low. The two men greeted each other, and Jenner laid his manuscript on the table, asking Low to examine it and estimate how long a time might be necessary to prepare it as a booklet.

Low picked it up and glanced through it, then knit his brows and looked thoughtful.

In those days, type for printing was hand-set, letter by letter; typesetting was slow work. In addition, Jenner had included a number of pictures in his manuscript. These would require the services of a good engraver, whose labor also was time-consuming. Low asked to be allowed to study the manuscript before he gave his exact estimate. And to this Jenner agreed, after reminding the printer that he and his wife wished to return to Berkeley as soon as possible. Low promised to have his answer within a day or two.

Next day, Edward Jenner went to see Mr. Hall, the chief surgeon of St. George’s Hospital. With him he carried a small package of his cowpox-tipped quills. Once in Mr. Hall’s office, Jenner told the surgeon about his many conclusive tests, and asked him to use the quills to make some trial inoculations of his own. If a surgeon of Hall’s standing should make such a test of cowpox inoculation, it would help toward having it recognized and accepted, he said.

Hall was not at all eager to help. He did not know that there was anything to Jenner’s discovery, he said, and he could not risk the good name of the hospital by making such trial inoculations. They might even be dangerous, for all he knew.

Again Jenner told him of the patients he had inoculated with cowpox, and of the unfailingly good results. And no pustules ever developed anywhere except where the scratches were made in giving the inoculation. But Hall would not be budged.

At London’s Smallpox Hospital, Jenner was refused again. Dr. William Woodville, the head of the institution, called Jenner’s idea and all his proof “nonsense.” He was one of the world’s authorities on smallpox, he added, and he knew more about it than any other London doctor. He did not believe anything better than the present method of inoculation with smallpox matter could be found as a preventive of the disease.

Jenner reminded him how poor that method was and how much harm it did.

“Would it not be worth while at least to try my discovery?” he asked.

William Woodville grew almost angry at that. Again he refused to have anything to do with cowpox inoculation.

When Edward Jenner left Woodville he felt hopeless and depressed, but he was not a person to admit defeat. There were still many other London surgeons and physicians to see, including Cline. He would make the rounds, and visit as many of them as he could.

He took courage, too, in thinking of his manuscript on cowpox inoculation. When that booklet came out, he would send it to the London doctors and to other important medical men of England and Scotland. What it told would surely make a favorable impression on them.

The next day he went back to the printer to get the estimate of how long it would take to print the booklet. The answer was discouraging. Sampson Low had figured that he would need at least three and a half months, possibly four, to complete the work.

Jenner was bitterly disappointed. He must stay in London and see the work through, for no one but he could read the proof and see that the illustrations were correctly placed. Nor could he go home to Berkeley and return later. The trip was too strenuous for that. But how could he stay away from his practice so long? And how could he and Catherine be separated from their other two children for all those months. He went back to his sister-in-law’s, feeling even more despondent.

His wife tried to cheer him. She said that since they would simply have to stay, they must not let that circumstance upset them. She would write to Eleanor and Stephen and ask if those two could keep the children a little longer. Catherine was sure they would do it gladly, and Edward Jenner nodded his head. He, for his part, would have to write to the surgeons of the towns near Berkeley in whose care he had left his patients. These men must be advised of the situation and asked to look after Jenner’s patients until he could return.

They visited Anne Hunter for a few days. She showed them John Hunter’s museum behind the house. He had left it to the city of London, she told them. Jenner talked to her about the cowpox lymph, and told her how worried he was because there was so much resistance to the idea. She encouraged him as Hunter would have done had he been alive.

“Surely someone will test such an important finding,” she said. She gave a deep sigh. “If only John were still living. How enthusiastically he would take up your cowpox inoculation.”

It was true, Jenner thought. If John Hunter were here he, Jenner, would have much less trouble in getting his cowpox inoculation recognized and put into wide use. Hunter had been a great, famous, and influential man.

Staying in London for a while longer had its interesting side for the Jenners. Here in the city a person was much closer to the news of the day. Everywhere one heard people talking about the brilliant, ambitious French army officer, Napoleon Bonaparte. There was talk of him in people’s homes, on the streets, in the coffeehouses. Napoleon, after conquering Italy and then Austria in the past year, in 1798, was now about to make trouble for the English. Reports were that the government of France had wanted him to attack England directly, but Napoleon had refused to do that. What were his plans, then? people wanted to know. Admiral Nelson, in command of the English fleet, had been sent out to follow Napoleon and the French fleet. Nelson was to outwit and outfight the French, if possible. All Europe was nervously watching.

Edward Jenner and his wife felt the excitement in the London air, though their own affairs absorbed them most. But Mrs. Jenner was not well, and she was worried about the other two children. Soon she took her daughter and traveled home.

Jenner continued to interview physicians and surgeons. Everywhere he met with the same response. “Nonsense,” the doctors said. Or, “It’s dangerous.” Or, “Your proof is not convincing.” No one would try the inoculation.

Only Henry Cline, the surgeon to St. Thomas’ Hospital, was friendly and open-minded. After listening to all that Jenner had to say, he decided he would try the inoculation on a case he had. He accepted one of the quills Dr. Jenner had brought him, and promised to keep a day-by-day report of the results.

Getting this cooperation was a great relief to Edward Jenner. He went home to the inn where he was now staying in a cheerful mood.

There were many days when Jenner could think of no one further to call on about his inoculations. Then he wrote to Daniel Ludlow, to his friends Gardner and Parry, to his nephews, Henry and George, and of course to Stephen and Eleanor about his disappointments with the London doctors. He walked in one of the parks, spent hours in Hunter’s museum, and looked up the few friends of long ago whom he still knew. But the time seemed to pass very slowly.

Early in July a package came for Jenner. It was the proof for his thick booklet, at last. Now Edward Jenner stopped all other activities. Carefully, thoughtfully, he read and corrected the proof. He took the pages back to Sampson Low in person. He told Low how much he appreciated the fine typesetting, and they discussed how the booklet should be handled when it was finished. They agreed that the printer would send seventy copies to Jenner, and the remainder to the bookshops so that they might be sold there. In this way, Jenner’s work would reach the most people.

After all the arrangements had been made, Jenner felt as though a great weight had been taken from his shoulders. It was mid-July and he was now free to go home to Berkeley. As far as the medical men here in London were concerned, he would give up personally trying to make them believe in his findings—at least for the present.

He would have to be patient. As things looked now, it might be years before cowpox inoculation would be accepted as the sure means of preventing smallpox.

He took the coach first to Cheltenham, where his wife had gone for her health, taking the children with her. From there they all went home together to Berkeley.

Jenner again felt the old deep joy at returning to his beloved valley.

Back in their own home outside Berkeley, the Jenners settled down quickly to their old routine of living. By the second day, the news of the doctor’s return had spread, and patients began to crowd his small dispensary.

During the afternoon of the next day, which was Sunday, Henry Jenner drove over from Stroud with his wife and child. He looked very cheerful and said immediately that he had great news for his uncle.

A strange thing had happened while Edward Jenner was away. The people of the valley had taken up the cause of cowpox inoculation. Word of its good results had spread all over the county. And, believing in it as the people did, they were demanding that the surgeons and doctors inoculate them and their children. The doctors had the choice of doing it or losing their patients. The very men who had sneered at Jenner just a few months before were inoculating with his cowpox material.

Edward Jenner was astonished, but immensely pleased.

Henry told him then with pride that he himself had inoculated many people in the past few months. And he had kept records for his uncle to see.

There was plenty of cowpox inoculating material on hand too, for now, with so many people being inoculated one after the other, a doctor could get material from the patient’s pustules as these developed, if there was no new outbreak of cowpox in the neighborhood. So, as he started his practice again, Edward Jenner was able to get a supply of cowpox pus from his nephew. Jenner gave his inoculations free. His great dream had always been to abolish smallpox—not to make money from the discovery of a safe preventive. The more people took the inoculations, the sooner the smallpox scourge would be wiped out in this region.

A few weeks after Jenner’s return to Berkeley a large package came to him from London. In it were the seventy copies of his freshly printed and bound booklet.

Fortunately the booklets came just before a meeting of the county medical society. Jenner attended the meeting, taking along a number of the booklets. He had expected some slight embarrassment and therefore some unfriendliness on the part of his colleagues. They would remember uncomfortably that they had once tried to oust him from membership, and now were using his inoculation treatment. But the men showed no such distress. They preferred to forget the incident. All spoke highly of the method now, and accepted with much interest the booklets Jenner gave them.

In August, 1798, a letter came from Henry Cline in London, telling about his test of Jenner’s method. He told Jenner that the inoculation had worked out well, and he gave the day-by-day record of the case. Cline fully endorsed Jenner’s discovery. He was the first London surgeon to do so. Although he was not one of the most prominent medical men of London, he was well established and well thought of, Jenner knew. His endorsement was a help.

Meanwhile, Jenner had sent copies of his booklet to each of the leading surgeons and physicians who had turned him down when he was in London. With the whole evidence before them in print, they began to be impressed. Cline discussed his test with some of these doctors, too, and news of that success spread, serving as additional proof of the inoculation’s effectiveness. Many London doctors now began to try cowpox inoculations.

Both Henry Cline and Anne Hunter sent Jenner the London newspapers. In them Jenner saw to his amazement that his smallpox inoculation had become big news. There were articles about it, and headlines. Doctors of the European mainland were becoming interested.

Then one day William Woodville, the head of the Smallpox Hospital in London, wrote and asked Jenner for some quills containing the cowpox inoculation material. At last he too was going to try it! Jenner was delighted, and sent the quills to him.

He felt very hopeful. Surely it could not be long before cowpox inoculation would come into general use.

THIRTEEN

The Final Campaign

Now That Everything was going so well, Jenner felt more relaxed and confident. He was of good cheer at gatherings of the family, and everyone remarked on how well he looked. He began to take a little more time off, too, for nature study. The weather was fine, and it was the best time of the year for outdoor excursions. Whenever he went on tramps that did not take him too far from home, he took his nine-year-old son, Edward, with him. It was time the boy learned to enjoy nature and to know something about it, Jenner thought, and young Edward was happy to go.

But soon another package of newspapers arrived, together with a letter from Cline. Trouble was again brewing for cowpox inoculation. As more and more medical men of England and the European mainland began to voice their approval of the new method, the surgeons and doctors who would not accept it began to talk and write against it more vigorously, too. They said a number of foolish things.

Most stupid, it seemed to Jenner, was the old claim that people who were inoculated in accordance with Jenner’s discovery would take on fearful animal characteristics. “Do you want your children to grow up acquiring the faces of cows?” some of Jenner’s opponents asked in the newspapers. Dr. Jenner answered these pieces, and his replies were printed too. Still he could not remedy all the harm that the opposition already had done.

Other trouble arose when some of the medical men who now approved of cowpox inoculation tried to take part of the credit for its development. Others, who were jealous of Jenner’s rising fame, said that it was not much of a discovery.

One man said, “Jenner didn’t invent cowpox any more than Watt invented steam.” This was fortunately answered in an article by a more reasonable man, who wrote, “Watt didn’t invent steam, but he discovered how to make it work a steam engine. To Jenner the same credit is due for discovering how to use cowpox for vaccine.”

A Dr. Ingenhousz came to London from the European mainland and spoke out against Jenner. He had read an article, he said, in which it had been conclusively proved that people inoculated with cowpox did get smallpox afterward. This statement also made headlines.

When he read this, Edward Jenner immediately sat down and wrote a letter explaining to Ingenhousz that the article he had mentioned had been written thirty years before. Since that time it had been proved that there were cows’ diseases that looked like cowpox, but were not. Undoubtedly it was an infection of this kind that these patients had suffered—and not cowpox—if they had not become resistant to smallpox, Jenner asserted. Moreover, the cowpox pus had to be taken at a certain stage of the pustules’ development, or the inoculation would not be effective. Again he told of the many people whom he and other doctors in Gloucestershire had inoculated, and of their proven immunity to smallpox.

At last Dr. Ingenhousz realized that he had expressed himself in public without enough knowledge. He wrote Jenner an apology.

But Ingenhousz’s erroneous statements and those of Jenner’s many other detractors had caused a great deal of uncertainty. To correct this, Jenner wrote another booklet. It analyzed the statements of his detractors and explained wherein they were wrong. He added some paragraphs on the preservation and storing of cowpox inoculation material, and warned against using any that was too old and weak, since it could not then give full protection.

He was hardly through with this manuscript when he received another London newspaper with a new story against his method. This time the attack came from Dr. Woodville, head of the London Smallpox Hospital, who had been so difficult before. The paper quoted him as saying that he had experienced bad results from using Jenner’s inoculation methods. Several of his patients had become seriously ill after their inoculations, and one had died.

This attack, from such an authority on smallpox, was very serious. It could do great harm, Dr. Jenner knew. It might even stop cowpox inoculation entirely.

He traveled to London on the first available coach. He did not know what had happened to make Woodville’s patients ill, but he knew that cowpox inoculations could not be to blame. If properly given, they simply could not have such a harmful effect. He meant to find out just what errors Woodville had made.

When Jenner arrived at the London Smallpox Hospital and announced himself, Dr. Woodville at first refused to see him. Jenner declared that he would wait until he was admitted to the office, and the London doctor finally consented to talk to him. After questioning Woodville and examining the patients’ records, Jenner easily found what the trouble was. Because of the careless and unsanitary methods of Dr. Woodville and his helpers, the patients had been infected with smallpox from other patients in the hospital. Worst of all, the doctors had used the same lancets for the cowpox inoculations that they had used for inoculating with smallpox pus—and without washing the instruments first! No wonder these patients had become seriously ill. Jenner spared no words in making Dr. Woodville aware of what he had done.

Dr. Jenner then went to his good friend Henry Cline and told him the whole story. Together they wrote a statement to the press, explaining the errors that had been made at the London Smallpox Hospital. They warned other doctors against making the same mistakes. Dr. Jenner again added a statement about the successful tests he and other medical men had made in London and Gloucestershire.

When the statement of the two doctors appeared in the newspapers, Woodville angrily answered it. A long-drawn-out public quarrel followed.

Meanwhile, Dr. Jenner had published his new pamphlet, the one written as an answer to Dr. Ingenhousz. Jenner and Cline sent copies of the pamphlet to all the prominent doctors and surgeons, and to the newspapers. It turned out to be very useful in the controversy with Dr. Woodville, as well as helpful in answering other people who were arguing against cowpox inoculation.

Slowly a change in opinion took place. Jenner’s enemies became silent. Successful medical men from all parts of England and from the continent wrote articles praising Jenner’s discovery and arguing that it should be universally used. (The French half jokingly called the inoculations after the Latin word vaccinus, having to do with cows, and so the terms “vaccine” and “vaccination” came into use.)

Woodville finally saw that he was wrong, and realized that there soon would be no need for the Smallpox Hospital. Accordingly, he closed it and let the news be known that he would open a new office where free cowpox vaccinations would be given according to Jenner’s method.

But later it was found that his carelessness continued. He had distributed contaminated lymph in Europe. It resulted in a minor smallpox epidemic. That again turned some people against the vaccine. Dr. Jenner had to clear this up, too. And he was able to disqualify Dr. Woodville’s work.

Others on the European mainland gave correct inoculations. Among the first was Dr. De Carro, a Viennese physician. He not only gave inoculations, but began writing about smallpox prevention. He spread the word of his successful results throughout his own country and neighboring lands.

By the summer of 1799, when Edward Jenner was fifty, he was gaining a reputation as a great scientific discoverer and lifesaver. Toward the end of that year, some thirty prominent doctors published a paper in praise of Dr. Jenner and his methods of vaccinating. The better-educated English people now began having their children vaccinated, and more of the poorer people followed their example.

Jenner was presented to the Prince of Wales, who was particularly interested in the discovery—and later to the King and Queen of England. He received a testimonial from Oxford University.

In the new, young United States of America, Dr. Waterhouse of Boston sent to Jenner for cowpox inoculation material. In 1800 he inoculated his own children with it, then, certain that they were immune, exposed them to smallpox in a hospital. None of them caught the dreaded disease. People were amazed and impressed. Vaccination was accepted in Massachusetts, and shortly in the other states.

In the summer of 1801 there was the beginning of an outbreak of smallpox among the men of the English fleet at Gibraltar. English doctors were sent to give the men on the ships and on land the new vaccination, and the disease was prevented from spreading.

Vaccination against smallpox spread further around the world. The preventive treatment was now used in Italy, France, Russia, Denmark, Prussia, Austria, Turkey, and India. Year after year more people were protected with it.

The King of Spain ordered several ships outfitted to carry vaccine to those parts of the New World which Spain held. Travel by sailing ship was slow, and vaccine carried in quills would have become useless before the ships reached their destinations. Twenty-two unvaccinated children and several doctors were among those aboard. At weekly intervals one child was vaccinated, and for each new patient to be vaccinated, serum from the last one’s pustules was used. In this way the supply of vaccine was kept fresh. A ship stopped at Puerto Rico, many ports in South America, the Philippines, and other Spanish-held countries. Wherever it stopped, some of the natives and their Spanish rulers were vaccinated. The local doctors then took serum from these cases and carried vaccination on in their countries, always keeping a supply of vaccine.

Slowly the dreadful disease smallpox was being stamped out in the Old World and the New.

This was at a time when England was still at war with France. Napoleon Bonaparte had been growing in power ever since his successful campaign in Italy and the coup d’etat that made him first consul. In 1804, he proclaimed himself Emperor of France and had himself crowned. He commanded that the men of his army and navy be inoculated with Jenner’s vaccine, and encouraged all the citizens of France to be inoculated. He saw smallpox, which had so often ravished the French people and particularly his troops, come to a stop whenever cowpox vaccine was used. He thankfully called Jenner one of the world’s greatest men.

At that time there were in French prisons a number of Englishmen whose release the British could not obtain. One of these, a Dr. Wickham, was very ill. It was reported that he would die unless he could be taken out of the filthy prison and brought home and given good care. His friends called on Dr. Jenner and asked if he would try to help.

“Your name stands for so much,” Wickham’s friends said, “you might be able to get us a hearing.”

Edward Jenner was more than willing to try, and wrote a letter to Napoleon. The story goes that the letter reached the Emperor while he and the Empress Josephine were traveling. Their carriage had stopped at a town and the horses were being changed when an aide handed the Emperor the open letter.

Not wishing to be bothered at the moment, Napoleon refused to look at it. But the Empress Josephine saw the name of Jenner at the bottom of the page and, it is said, drew it to the Emperor’s attention.

“Jenner?” Napoleon said, interest flashing into his face. “Jenner? What does he want? I would not refuse that great man any request.”

After reading the letter, he gave orders that Dr. Wickham should be released immediately and sent back to England.

Edward Jenner was happy, and thanked Napoleon. By writing to the Emperor, he was able to help several other people who were imprisoned in France, though he was mindful that he must not overstep his privilege.

He continued, all these years, to work for improvements in procuring and storing vaccine. And always he spent much time in getting its use established more firmly, not only in England but in other lands. He had the great satisfaction of seeing the incidence of smallpox stopped wherever vaccination was practiced.

An equally important result of his discovery was that it opened a door to the broad field of research for other scientists and medical men. And research led to the discovery of inoculations against many other diseases. All modern inoculations are actually the result of this first great discovery of Edward Jenner’s.

Jenner was a kind man. In the years of his fame and success he often extended money to fellow doctors who had become ill and could not make a living. He himself was not wealthy, however. In fact, as time went on, he became quite short of funds, for he had spent so much time and money in the course of his work against smallpox.

Fortunately, in 1802, Parliament voted him a grant of ten thousand pounds in appreciation of his service to mankind. Five years later he was given a second parliamentary grant, this time of twenty thousand pounds.

For a while he divided his time between Berkeley and Cheltenham, where his wife seemed to thrive better. After her death he returned to Berkeley for good and lived there until his death on January 26, 1823. In these last years his daughter Catherine and son Robert stayed with him until each of them married.

To the end, Edward Jenner liked to keep busy and feel useful. At the local people’s request he became their magistrate, though he still carried on a part of his medical practice in his old age.

He was a contented man, happy because he had stopped suffering and death for millions of people—and for his contribution to humankind he was loved on every continent.

Chronology

1749 Edward Jenner born in Berkeley, England.

1755 Jenner’s father died. Edward Jenner went to live with his brother, Stephen, and his wife.

1763 Jenner went to study with Daniel Ludlow, surgeon, at Sodbury.

1770 Jenner went to London to study with John Hunter.

1773 Jenner started his medical practice in Berkeley.

1788    Married Catherine Kingscote.

1789    First child, Edward, born.

1791    Inoculation with swinepox pus.

1792    Jenner received doctor’s degree from St. Andrews University, Scotland.

1793    John Hunter died.

1796    Jenner inoculated Jamie Phipps with cowpox pus from Sarah Nelmes’s hands.

1796    Jenner gave Jamie Phipps a smallpox inoculation and proved him immune.

1798  Jenner journeyed to London to convince doctors and surgeons of the value of cowpox inoculation as protection against smallpox.

1798    Jenner’s pamphlet on his discovery published.

1798, 1799   Smallpox vaccine began to be used in England and on the European continent.

1799    Smallpox vaccine tested successfully by Dr. Waterhouse in Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts.

1801    Smallpox outbreak among men of English fleet at Gibraltar stopped by vaccinations.

1802    English Parliament voted Jenner a grant of 10,000 pounds in appreciation of his service to mankind. Another grant of 20,000 pounds given five years later. Jenner honored in many lands from 1799 on.

   1823  Jenner died.

Index

Anatomical drawings

Anatomy

Banks, Joseph

Barber-surgeons

Berkeley, Earl of

Berkeley Valley, Gloucestershire

Bird studies see Cuckoos

Body snatchers

Brown, William

Chronology of Edward Jenner’s life

Clayton, Henry

Cline, Henry

Clissold, Reverend Dr.

College of Physicians, London

Cook, Captain James

Cowpox, and cowpox inoculations-see also Smallpox; Swinepox

Crump, Mr.

Cuckoos

De Carro, Dr.

Dissection

Doctors

England, King and Queen of

Farrow, William

Ferryman, Mr.

Franklin, Benjamin

Galen

George III, King of England

Gibraltar, English fleet at

Gloucester Infirmary

Goldsmith, Oliver

Grave robbers 

Haller, Albrecht von

Harvey, William

Heart disease

Hippocrates

Home, E.

Hooper, Mrs.

Human anatomy

Hunter, Anne

Hunter, John

Hunter, William

Hunter’s museum

Ingenhousz, Dr.

“Inoculation stables” 

Inoculations, early attempts at,- see also Cowpox; Smallpox; swinepox

An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of Variolae Vaccinae

Jenner, Catherine (daughter)

Jenner, Catherine Kingscote

Jenner, Edward:

childhood

chronology of life 

death

marriage

medical apprenticeship

Royal Society, election to

St. Andrew’s University, degree from

schooldays

studies with Hunter

Jenner, Edward (son)

Jenner, Eleanor

Jenner, George

Jenner, Henry, Sr.

Jenner, Henry, Jr.

Jenner, Jane

Jenner, Robert

Jenner, Stephen

Josephine, Empress of France

Kingscote, Catherine see Jenner, Catherine Kingscote 

Leeuwenhoek

Linnaeus

London, England

Low, Sampson

Ludlow, Daniel

Marlowe’s farm

Massachusetts, vaccination accepted in,

Medical society, Gloucester

Medicine, eighteenth century

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

Museum, Hunter’s

Napoleon

Nelmes, Sarah

Nelson, Admiral

New World, vaccine carried to

Oxford University

Parry, Dr.

Parsons, Squire

Pennypacker, Mr.

Perkins, George

Perkins, Mrs.

Phipps, Jamie

Phipps, Mrs. John

Prewitt’s farm 

Reynolds, Joshua

Rheumatic fever

Royal College of Surgeons

Royal Society

Ruse, Samuel

St. Andrew’s University, Scotland

St. George’s Hospital

St. Thomas’ Hospital

Smallpox:

cowpox see Cowpox dangers

epidemics

first experiment

inoculations see Inoculations

investigations

observations

Smallpox Hospital, London

Spain, King of

Stoneham Farm

Surgical shock

swinepox 

Tuberculosis

Turnbull, Mrs.

Typhus

United States of America 

Vaccine, term

Variolae vaccinae, term

The Vicar of Wakefield 

Wales, Prince of

Washbourn, Dr. Charles

Waterhouse, Dr.

Watt, James

Wickham, Dr.

Woodville, Dr. William

For Students and Teachers

More titles from Ebooksforstudents.org where district-wide, school-wide, and classroom-wide licenses are available. Please call us with questions about educational licenses at 202-464-9126.

(Samples of all the ebooks below are available on Amazon.)

Young Adult Books
(with Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level)

Flight to Freedom-The Story of the Underground Railroad

by Henrietta Buckmaster (4.7)

Revolt on the Amistad 

by Emma Gelders Sterne (5.1)

Patrick Henry: Firebrand of the Revolution

by Nardi Campion (5.6)

Benito Juarez-Builder of a Nation

by Emma Gelders Sterne (6.3)

Juarez-Hero of Mexico

by Nina Brown Baker (6.0)

Malcolm X: Another Side of the Movement

by Mark Davies (6.1)

Mary McLeod Bethune

by Emma Gelders Sterne. (7.6)

The Life of W.E.B. Du Bois: His Was the Voice

by Emma Gelders Sterne (6.5)

Michael Faraday

by Harry Sootin (6.4)

He Wouldn't be King: The Story of Simon Bolivar

by Nina Brown Baker (6.3)

Lenin with a Study Guide

by Nina Baker Brown (9.0)

Thomas Edison

by Roselyn and Ray Eldon Hiebert (9.1)

Revolts, Resistance and Emancipation

by Dorothy Sterling (9.1)

Bayard Rustin: Behind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movement

by James Haskin (11.0)

Power to the People: The Rise and Fall of the Black Panther Party

by Jim Haskins (11.3)

Military/Political Memoirs

Leatherhead in Korea: On the Front Lines with a U.S. Marine Combat Artist

by Norval E. Packwood (mostly illustrations) (3.0)

Serenade to the Big Bird

by Bert Stiles (6.2)

Agent in Italy with a Study Guide

by S.K. (6.4)

The New Legions

by Donald Duncan (6.7)

Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific with Maps

By Robert Leckie (7.4)

Runaway Russia

by Florence McLeod Harper (6.4)

Freedom Ride: Civil Rights and Non-Violent Resistance with a Forward by James Baldwin

by James Peck (9.4)

Journalism and Biographies

Mrs. R: The Life of Eleanor Roosevelt

by Alfred Steinberg (8.3)

War in Korea: the Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent

by Marguerite Higgins (Pulitzer Prize Winner for International Reporting) (8.4)

Mississippi Notebook: Freedom Summer June-August 1964

by Nicholas Von Hoffman (8.7)

Abraham Lincoln

by James Daugherty (8.8)

Revolution in Mexico-Death is Incidental

by Heath Bowman and Sterling Dickinson (8.8).

Benjamin Franklin: The First Civilized American

by Philips Russell (9.5)

Thurgood Marshall: From His Early Years to Brown

by Hunter R. Clark and Michael D. Davis (10.1)

Thurgood Marshall: His Triumph in Brown, His Years on the Supreme Court

by Hunter R. Clark and Michael D. Davis (10.2)

The Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott, Founder of the Chicago Defender

by Roi Ottley (11.0)

Harlem: People, Power, and Politics 1900-1950

by Roi Ottley, previously published as New World A-Coming for which Ottley won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (9.5)

A Stranger in My House: Jews and Arabs in the West Bank

by Walter Reich (14.5)

The Legend of John Brown

by Richard O. Boyer (15.9)

Individual copies are available at Amazon. Class set licenses, school-wide, and district-wide licenses which provide students with ebooks at 5¢ a copy and less are available at ebooksforstudents.org