arts, ideas & societyThe Public Domain Review1796–1805 · Britain
Edward Jenner's smallpox vaccine was once blamed for horns, ox faces and cloven minds
When Edward Jenner introduced the smallpox vaccine in 1796, using cowpox to protect against the deadlier disease, critics in Georgian Britain feared that the cow material would turn people bestial. Pamphlets such as Dr William Rowley's Cow-Pox Inoculation (1805) showed an "ox-faced boy" and a "Mange Girl" as supposed side effects. Cartoons showed people sprouting horns and cattle heads. The fears drew on religious ideas that mixing human and animal was unnatural, and on distrust of the new medicine. Despite this, vaccination spread, and smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980.
Jenner noticed that milkmaids who caught mild cowpox seemed immune to smallpox. He inoculated a boy with cowpox material in 1796 and showed the boy resisted smallpox.
The panic shows that fear of vaccines is almost as old as vaccines. The word "vaccine" itself comes from vacca, Latin for cow, which shaped the fears.
James Gillray's 1802 cartoon The Cow-Pock showed people with small cows bursting from their bodies after vaccination.
background
Edward Jenner (17 May 1749 – 26 January 1823) was an English physician and scientist who pioneered the concept of vaccines and created the smallpox vaccine, the world's first vaccine. The terms vaccine and vaccination are derived from Variolae vaccinae ("pustules of the cow"), the term devised by Jenner to denote cowpox. He used it in 1798 in the title of his Inquiry into the Variolae vaccinae known as the Cow Pox, in which Jenner described the protective effect of cowpox against smallpox.
From Wikipedia: Edward Jenner (CC BY-SA 4.0) ↗see
key facts
- Born
- 17 May 1749
- Died
- 26 January 1823
- Known as
- physician, naturalist
Facts: Wikidata (CC0)
Image: The Public Domain Review
