QI The Book of the Dead

Jenner’s support. Nevertheless, the medical authorities dragged their feet: it took until 1840 for the government to set up a national programme of free vaccination.
    By then, Jenner had been dead for seventeen years. In 1815 his wife, like his eldest son, fell victim to tuberculosis and Jenner himself, increasingly infirm and tired of the public attention, returned to his haven at Berkeley. He remained there until his own death eight years later. A year before he died, he was appointed Physician Extraordinary to George IV.
    In his last years, Jenner occasionally treated patients, but spent of most his time out among nature, his original inspiration, finishing his investigations into the migration of birds and importing and propagating exotic fruits. He also made arrangements to help James Phipps, the cowpox guinea pig, who had also fallen ill with tuberculosis. Poor Phipps had been variolated at least twenty times after Jenner’s original experiment by other doctors keen to test the results for themselves. As a mark of gratitude, Jenner designed and built Phipps a small cottage and personally supervised the laying-out of the garden and vegetable patch that went with it. Of the other players in the cowpox drama, nothing more was heard of the milkmaid, Sarah Nelmes, but the hide of her cow Blossom still hangs in St George’s Hospital, Tooting. The cow’s horns – rather like bits of the True Cross – have multiplied since her death: at least six ‘authentic’ pairs have been recorded.
    It’s hard to overstate Jenner’s legacy. He founded the discipline we now call immunology. The modern equivalent of his discovery would be if a cure for cancer were announced tomorrow. Smallpox, the speckled devil, ‘the most dreadfulscourge of the human species’ for millennia, was declared finally eradicated by the World Health Organization in 1980, just as Jenner had predicted it would be back in 1801.
    The joy I felt as the prospect before me of being the instrument destined to take away from the world one of its greatest calamities was so excessive that I found myself in a kind of reverie .
     
    What is truly admirable is Jenner’s attitude. He knew he was right; he never gave up; he didn’t try to profit from his discovery. He just took quiet pleasure in being the right man in the right place at the right time.

     
    There was nothing quiet about Mary Seacole (1805–81), although she, too, was an exceptional healer. The Jamaican-born heroine of the Crimean War, forgotten for almost a hundred years, has recently been re-discovered and restored to her rightful place as one of great characters of the nineteenth century.
    The daughter of a Scottish soldier and a Jamaican nurse, Mary Grant grew up in a boarding house for sick and disabled members of the armed forces, run by her mother in Kingston, Jamaica. As a teenager, she made her way to England on her own, paying her way with a suitcase full of exotic West Indian pickles. When she returned home to take over the running of the boarding house, she was able to combine her knowledge of traditional Caribbean healing with the latest Western medical ideas she had picked up in London. In 1836 she married Edwin Horatio Hamilton Seacole, an English merchant resident in the house, who was rumoured to be the illegitimate son of Horatio Nelson and Lady Hamilton. Buther happiness was tragically short-lived. In 1843 a fire wrecked the boarding house and, the following year Mary’s husband and mother both died. Grief-stricken and penniless, Mary left Jamaica for a second time to join her brother in Panama, where they jointly ran a hotel. It was there that she first got to practise her medical skills in earnest, nursing the victims of outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever – with remarkable results. Her method was based on careful observation of the symptoms of each individual patient: ‘…few constitutions permitted the use of exactly similar remedies, and…the course of treatment which saved one man, would, if persisted in, have very likely killed his brother.’ Although some of her medications, like sugar of lead, probably did more harm than good, her attentiveness and general empathy with the suffering of those in her care offered a holistic approach to healing that was ahead of its time.
    Encouraged by her success, she applied to the British War Office to serve as a nurse in the Crimea. Never one to underdramatise her life, Mary wrote that she wanted to experience ‘the