well. His sister Deborah took him into her family home, and his brother Stephen planned out his education, so that by the age of thirteen he was apprenticed to a surgeon in nearby Chipping Sodbury. Edward was a happy, self- absorbed child, obsessed with fossil hunting and natural history. By the time he was nine he had a large collection of dormouse nests and would always carry a large pocketbook to record his observations. He could never walk past a butcher’s shop without peering at the various organs on display in case they revealed something anatomically interesting. He maintained his interest in such things throughout his life, long after he became famous. As an old man, he was delighted to be the first to find and identify the fossilized bones of an aquatic dinosaur (the plesiosaur) near his home. To him, fossils were no dusty old bits of rock; they were “monuments to departed worlds.”
Edward Jenner would have appreciated Epicurus’s belief that happiness comes from living an unobtrusive life. “As for fame, what is it?” he wrote to a friend. “A gilded butt for ever pierced with the arrows of malignancy.” But, try as he might, anonymity was not to be his destiny. Aged twenty-one, he went to London to study anatomy, physiology, and midwifery under the eminent surgeon John Hunter (1728–93). Hunter was the most distinguished anatomist of his day, and it was he who encouraged Jenner to experiment rather than speculate about his scientific ideas. His motto was: “Don’t think, try!” On his two acres of land at Earl’s Court, Hunter kept ostriches, leopards, buffalo, jackals, and snakes, all for his students to carve up and investigate. If need be, he supplemented his supply by bringing in the carcasses of exotic beasts from the Royal Zoo at the Tower of London.
In 1771, when Joseph Banks returned from James Cook’s first voyage, Hunter recommended Jenner to catalog his botanical collection. Banks agreed, and was so impressed with Jenner’s work that he invited him to join Cook’s second voyage in 1772. After some hard thought, Jenner decided against it and went back home to set up his own general practice in Gloucestershire. He had also turned down John Hunter’s offer of a partnership, but the two men kept in close touch, with Hunter directing Jenner’s research into natural history by letter. After Jenner suffered a romantic setback, Hunter wrote to him, saying:
Let her go, never mind her. I will employ you with hedge-hogs, for I do not know how far I may trust mine. I want you to get a hedge-hog in the beginning of winter and weigh him; put him in your garden, and let him have some leaves, hay or straw, to cover himself, which he will do; then weigh him in the Spring and see what he has lost.
Jenner was fascinated by hibernation and skeptical of contemporary theories that birds (like bats) hibernated in winter. He dissected them and found seeds that came from other countries. He also noted that returning swallows were not, in fact, “dirty”—going against the prevailing wisdom that they spent the winter asleep in the mud at the bottom of ponds.
His work on bird migration wasn’t published until the very end of his life, but it was an earlier piece of birdlife research that first made his name. In 1787, his “Observations on the Cuckoo” revealed that cuckoo chicks have hollows in their backs, allowing them to scoop up the other baby birds in the nest and tip them over the side. This unique feature is present for only the first twelve days of the cuckoo’s life. Until Jenner’s publication, it had been assumed that it was the foster birds that got rid of their own chicks. His theory wasn’t universally accepted until photography confirmed he was right in the twentieth century, but it was good enough to get him elected to the Royal Society in 1789.
Close observation was Jenner’s forte and it led to another breakthrough: he was one of the first doctors to make a connection between arteriosclerosis of the coronary arteries and angina. In 1786, he noted that in one of his patients who had suffered from angina, the coronary arteries were “blocked” with a “white fleshy cartilaginous matter” that made a grating sound when he cut through them. “The heart, I believe,” he wrote, “in every subject that has died of the
Jenner thoroughly enjoyed life in Gloucestershire. He was a popular country-house guest, highly regarded as a witty raconteur, poet, and violinist. He was also a natty dresser. According to his friend Edward Gardner, he was usually to be seen in “a blue coat, and yellow buttons, buckskin, well polished jockey boots with silver spurs, and he carried a smart whip with a silver handle.” Like Ben Franklin and Epicurus, he loved like-minded company, and founded two clubs: the Convivio-Medical Society and the Medico-Convivial Society. They met in separate inns and had, as their names imply, similar interests but opposite priorities. Jenner was also a keen balloonist, a hobby that terrified the local farmers but was to lead him to his future wife, Catherine: His unmanned, varnished-silk balloon landed in the grounds of her father’s estate.
Edward and Catherine were married in 1788 and had four children. The eldest, Edward, died of tuberculosis, aged twenty-one. Jenner was devastated but, ever the scientist, used the blood from his son’s frequent bleedings to enrich his manure to see if it had any effect on the growth of plants.
He was forty-seven when he made the discovery that would make him famous. By the late eighteenth century, 60 percent of the population of Europe was infected with smallpox. A third of those who contracted the disease died and survivors were left horribly disfigured. Elsewhere in the world, the toll was even worse: An estimated 95 percent of the indigenous peoples in the Americas perished from the disease after the conquistadores brought it with them in the fifteenth century. When Jenner was a child, the only hope of staving it off was a process called variolation
Jenner had suffered the discomfort of variolation as a child—it also involved being starved and purged—and though he introduced it to his village practice as a standard procedure, he began experimenting to see if a safer alternative could be found. Among his patients, he noticed that milkmaids rarely caught smallpox but regularly needed treating for cowpox, a related but much less virulent infection contracted from milking cows. He wondered if country lore that cowpox protected you from smallpox might have some basis in truth.
On May 14, 1796, he took some discharge from cowpox pustules on the hand of a milkmaid called Sarah Nelmes and inserted it into an incision in the arm of eight-year-old James Phipps, the son of his gardener. Other than a slight fever, Phipps was fine. Six weeks later, Jenner inoculated him with pus from a smallpox sufferer. Again, no reaction. This wasn’t the first time it had been tried—a Dorset farmer called Benjamin Jesty had deliberately infected his wife and children with cowpox during a local smallpox epidemic twenty years earlier—but it was the first time it had been done scientifically. Two years later, having performed the procedure, which he named vaccine inoculation, or vaccination for short (from the Latin
The conclusion that Jenner reached was that the cowpox vaccine was safer than variolation and provided indefinite protection against smallpox. It could also be inoculated person to person. News of the
Messages of admiration flooded in from all over the world. Thomas Jefferson wrote offering “to render you my portion of the tribute of gratitude due to you from the whole human family. Medicine has never before produced any single improvement of such utility.” Native Americans sent him a wampum belt and taught their children his name, which they commended to the Great Spirit. The British MP William Wilberforce commented that there was “no man who is so much inquired after, by Foreigners when they arrive in this country.” Jenner even corresponded with Napoleon, securing the release of two English prisoners, one of them a relative. Napoleon had already issued instructions for the mass vaccination of the French people. “Ah Jenner,” he exclaimed, “I can refuse him nothing.”
Not everyone was convinced: The variolators saw the vaccine as a serious threat to business, and other doctors questioned whether Jenner’s sampling and recording methods were rigorous enough. Some patients were wary, too—scared that they might sprout horns or udders if excretions derived from cows were injected into them.
