May 15, 2007
Edward Jenner Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:40 AM EST The front page of this website noted yesterday that May 14 is the anniversary of Edward Jenner’s 1796 first vaccination of a patient. Jenner had noticed that milkmaids did not generally get smallpox, and he inoculated an eight-year-old boy, James Phipps, with material gathered from cowpox blisters on the hand of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes. I think modern historians of medicine now count Jenner as one of six people who over a period of a quarter century tested the possibility of using a cowpox-derived vaccine to immunize people against smallpox, but when I was a small boy reading more simplified and heroic accounts, Jenner invented vaccination, and modern medicine was born. It may in fact have been born at any one of a number of earlier and later moments, depending on how you choose to define medical modernity; I remember learning only later in life that for almost all of history the medical profession was in many respects as likely to kill you as to cure you, and that this would continue to be the case for many decades after Jenner. The crucial episodes in changing that ratio of results, as I remember the heroic and simplified version of the story, included vaccination, antisepsis, and antibiotics. In the popular histories of my youth, there were a fair number of medical heroes and very few if any medical villains. Then, when I was in my thirties, HIV was discovered, and there were some reported cases of doctors refusing to work on patients who had been infected with the virus. It was shocking, and instructive: Doctors looked less systematically heroic than they had before, and the art and science of medicine looked less absolutely impressive. In the first decades of the antibiotic revolution, laypeople may have had an easy notion that all infections could be cured. It wasn’t true, HIV brought that home, and more skepticism about medicine, science generally, and technical expertise seemed to find expression in both mass and elite culture. But we tend to overcorrect mistakes. The great revolution in our technical culture is biotechnology, and over the next decades it seems as reasonable to expect fantastic increases in our power over disease as it is to expect new pessimism and humility. Possibly as a result, the antiscientific prejudices of some academics in the humanities are now starting to look as old-fashioned as that mid-twentieth century fawning on the medical profession. Some simplified stories, after all, remain largely true. In 1980, the World Health Organization declared smallpox an eradicated disease, and I remember reading about it and thinking that for almost all of history, that would have been a nonesense sentence. How, during all those millennia, could a disease possibly have been “eradicated”? Jenner remains a real hero, in fact a wonderful one, even after the more sophisticated versions of medical history have been written and widely circulated.
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