Honey Mountain Character Badges by Emily Taylor
I have just had my first Covid-19 vaccination and it has set me thinking about the wonderful invention of immunisation. I have read that the idea of inoculation against disease was thought up a long time ago and it was called variolation. In 1721 the practise was brought back to England from Turkey by Ambassador Montagu’s remarkable wife, Lady Mary Montagu. (She’s worth Googling). It was a very dangerous practice though and seems to have been mostly tried out by foolhardy members of the aristocracy.
Then on 14th May 1796 Dr Edward Jenner, working in his surgery in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, proved that protection could be safely offered against the scourge of smallpox.
It was well known that milkmaids who had previously caught cowpox, a less virulent version of the disease, did not catch the more deadly smallpox. Working on the hypothesis that cowpox had the ability to immunise the body against smallpox Jenner decided to inoculate an eight-year-old boy called James Phipps, the son of his gardener, using pus from a cowpox blister. A milkmaid called Sarah donated the pus from her blisters after having caught cowpox from Blossom the cow. Blossom’s hide is on display at St George’s University, London, while her horns can be seen in the Jenner Museum in Berkeley.
I’ve often wondered whether James had any say in the matter. After all, medical ethics hadn’t been invented back then. Perhaps the conversation went like this:
JAMES (wailing) “I don’t want to do it, Mother”.
MOTHER (hand in pocket jingling the coins the good doctor had given her) “You have to, dearie, or there won’t be steak and kidney puddin’ for supper”.
FATHER (annoyed that the tried and tested method of food bribery didn’t seem to be working) “ ‘Course you’ll do it, me lad, or you’ll get a clip round the ear”.
Who knows? Whether he had to be coerced or not we have every reason to be grateful to James Phipps as well as to the many other brave and willing volunteers who have put themselves forward over the years. There’s no other reliable way to find out whether a vaccine is truly safe and effective. It has to be tried out on living humans so a huge thank you to all those who stepped forward to test the Covid-19 vaccine. Where would we be without them?
Edward Jenner was educated at Katherine Lady Berkeley School in Wotton-under-Edge which is the same school, although not in the same building, that our three children attended.
There is a Museum at Jenner’s old house and surgery in Berkeley which before Covid-19 you could visit most days from 11.00am to 5.00pm at a cost of £6.95 per adult. You could also inspect the tiny cottage at the bottom of the garden where he set up his vaccination clinic. He called it his Temple of Vacinnia which, along with the word vaccine, comes from the Latin for cow.
I read yesterday that the Jenner Museum, like so many museums, is in financial trouble because of this pandemic. Let’s hope that it survives. It would be a terrible irony if a museum dedicated to this great discovery went under because of a modern pestilence that can only be controlled by vaccination, one of the greatest medical tools ever invented.
