QI The Book of the Dead

disfigured. Elsewhere in the world, the toll was even worse: an estimated 95 per cent of the indigenous peoples in the Americas perished from the disease after the Conquistadors 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 ( variola was the scientific name for smallpox, from the Latin varius , ‘spotty’) where dried smallpox scabs were rubbed into a cut on the hand in the hope that the body would develop resistance to the full-blown disease. It was reasonably effective, but the side effects were unpleasant and the risk of contracting smallpox remained unacceptably high.
    Jenner had suffered the discomfort of variolation as a child – italso 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 14 May 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 vacca , ‘cow’) on more than twenty patients, Jenner published the paper that would change everything: Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae…known by the name of the Cow-pox (1798).
    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 Inquiry spread all over the world and within two years it had been translated into Latin, German, French, Italian, Dutch and Spanish. Jenner’s life changed overnight. ‘I have decided,’ he declared, ‘no matter what trials and tribulationslie before me, to dedicate the whole of my life to ridding the world of smallpox.’ This modest country doctor became ‘the Vaccine Clerk to the World’, sending samples of his vaccine to everyone who needed it. In his own garden at Berkeley, he built a small hut, which he called the ‘Temple of Vaccinia’, where he vaccinated the poor for free. He was feted by London society, presented to George III and Queen Charlotte, met the tsar of Russia and the king of Prussia, received the freedom of the cities of London, Dublin, Edinburgh and Glasgow and was awarded honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge.
    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. But both the army and navy promptly adopted vaccination as standard procedure and many of Britain’smost eminent physicians came out in