Did Jenner Really Make A Breakthrough In The Fight Against Disease? Essay, Research Paper

In the

18th century, medical knowledge was still quite basic with very few advances

since the middle-ages. The biggest advances had come from Versailles, Pare and

Harvey, but these advances were just in knowledge of the human body, not in the

treatment of disease. The main treatments of disease were based on the four

humours still and the most common was bleeding. Smallpox

was a huge problem in the 18th? century

because it was fatal, contagious and incurable. None of the treatments based of

the four humours would work. The first attempts to cure Smallpox were in China

where scabs where taken from victims of smallpox, ground up and blown up the

patients nose. This cure was very unreliable as there are two strains of

smallpox and if the most virulent stain was given to the patient, there was a

30% chance of death. In 1721, a smallpox epidemic broke out in Britain and the

Chinese method of variolation was used to inoculate several children but it was

not widely accepted. Edward

Jenner was born on 17th April 1749. In 1756 Edward Jenner under went

variolation and nearly died of its side-effects. When he was 13, he was

apprenticed to a surgeon for 7 years. After hearing about the idea that

milkmaids didn’t get smallpox, but suffered from the harmless cowpox, Jenner

became interested in finding a safe vaccination for Smallpox. ?On 14th May 1796, Jenner vaccinated an 8 year

old boy, James Phipps, with material from a cowpox sore on the hand of a

milkmaid, Sarah Nelmes. James developed cowpox but after a couple of weeks it

had gone. Jenner then infected James with smallpox. To his surprise James did

not catch the infection. Jenner’s

cure for smallpox did not catch on, with people believing that a human could

not be cured by an animal and that they might develop characteristics of cows

if they had the vaccination. Eventually, Jenner’s method was accepted and

vaccination against smallpox went ahead. Jenner’s

discovery was a breakthrough in that he lead the way for other doctors and

scientists to find cures for many other diseases. Unfortunately, because Jenner

did not know how his vaccination worked, it was only until Pasteur linked

disease to microbes that new vaccinations started appearing.