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Updated: May 5, 2025
In this message to the various legislatures the great statesman said: "The hopes placed in the efficacy of the cowpox virus as a preventive of smallpox have proved entirely deceptive." Realizing this to be a fact, most of the German governments have modified or entirely relinquished their compulsory vaccination laws.
Cattle roaming in pasture and prairie have never been affected by cowpox, nor have domesticated steers and oxen. If this disease were a disorder peculiar to cattle, both sexes would be equally affected. Jenner's cowpox was caused by the diseased hands of the syphilitic milkmaid, Sarah Nehnes."
The clergy resisted Jenner when he introduced vaccination, and yet the application of this measure of defense against disease has probably saved more lives than the total of all the lives lost in all wars. The clergy maintained that "Smallpox is a visitation from God, and originates in man, but Cowpox is produced by presumptious, impious men.
The first instance of this principle was in vaccination against smallpox, now practised for more than a century. Cowpox is doubtless closely related to smallpox, and an attack of the former conveys a certain amount of protection against the latter.
More than eighty years had passed since on May 14, 1796, Jenner had vaccinated a child with cowpox and proved that a slight attack of one disease protected the body from a disease of an allied nature.
Those who are acquainted with the effects of sympathy, and imitation, and panic, in the production of nervous disorders, will readily apprehend the meaning of the Professor. Some of these diseases speedily run their course and exhaust themselves. Cowpox and farcy, in many instances, have this character. Perhaps, to a certain degree, this may be affirmed of all of them.
It occurred to Dr. Jenner that if this inoculation with cowpox would protect these milkmaids, it would be an infinitely safer thing to use to protect children than even the mildest known form of inoculation.
That he was exposed to the matter when it had undergone the putrefactive change is highly probable from the doctor's observing that the sick cows at the farm gave out an OFFENSIVE STENCH FROM THEIR UDDERS. However, I must remark that it is unusual for cattle to suffer to such an extent, when disordered with the cowpox, as to make a bystander sensible of any ill smell.
Jenner was not a man of science; but he was not a fool; and when he found that people who had suffered from cowpox either by contagion in the milking shed or by vaccination, were not, as he had supposed, immune from smallpox, he ascribed the cases of immunity which had formerly misled him to a disease of the horse, which, perhaps because we do not drink its milk and eat its flesh, is kept at a greater distance in our imagination than our foster mother the cow.
Finally, in 1796, he made his first experiment in vaccination, inoculating a boy of eight with cowpox, and, after his recovery, with smallpox; with the result that the boy did not take the latter disease. Jenner's first paper on his discovery was never printed; but in 1798 appeared the first of the following treatises.
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