Edward Jenner

Edward Jenner was a Gloucestershire country doctor who noticed that milkmaids who had caught cowpox did not get smallpox, and in 1796 inoculated a boy with matter from a milkmaid’s sore and then, weeks later, with smallpox, which did not take. The Three Original Publications on Vaccination of 1798 and after report the experiment and its extension, against the opposition of the profession, and the word vaccine comes from the cow. Parliament voted him thirty thousand pounds; Napoleon released English prisoners at his request; smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980. The Harvard Classics print the papers among the founding documents of medicine.