Edward
Jenner
Edward
Jenner is a man that was born on May 17th, 1749 in the own of
Berkeley, Gloucestershire. He was the son of the vicar in his town, which is an
important person in the church. When he was 14 years old, he became an
apprentice to a surgeon close to his home, and then he continued on to train in
London. When he was 23, he returned to his hometown, and he worked as a doctor
there for the rest of his working life.
When
Edward Jenner was 47 years old, was when he performed an experiment that is
crucial to the lives that we live today. Jenner had a theory that had to do
with a “folklore”. This “folklore” had to do with the fact that milkmaids, or
women that milked cows and worked with them constantly, wo had contracted
cowpox from the cows, never contracted smallpox. This was very interesting to
Edward Jenner because smallpox was a detrimental illness at that point in time,
and it was causing a lot of people to die from it, especially children. So, his
experiment was to extract pus from one of the cow’s cowpox, and insert that pus
into someone’s body. He was sure that in doing so, it would cause the person
injected with the pus from the cowpox to be immune to getting smallpox. He performed
this experiment for the first time on an eight-year-old named James Phipps.
Jenner submitted a
paper describing his experiment to the Royal Society in 1797, but they said
that they would need more proof in order to believe that this was indeed true.
So, Edward Jenner performed this experiment on many other children, one of them
being his 11-month-old son. In the following year, the results of the
experiment were published, and Jenner named it a “vaccine”, which comes from
the Latin word “vacca” for cow. After all of this, Edward Jenner was, of
course, ridicules as many geniuses are. But, once people came to realize how
amazing his discovery was, the people silenced. Edward Jenner died at the age
of 74.
Obviously, Jenner
discovered and created vaccines, and they are widely used today. This is a
monumental discovery in the field of biology and zoology. Many lives have been
prolonged due to vaccines, and his initial discovery provoked the ideas of
others to create more and more vaccines.
I chose to base my
assignment on Edward Jenner because he was someone on the list that I had never
heard of, and when I started reading about him, I realize that he is such a
huge part of history and that everyone should know who he is. There is no doubt
that his discovery has shaped life today, because if we didn’t have vaccines,
everyone would be contracting deadly diseases and many more lives would have
been lost. Edward Jenner has had a huge impact on life today, and I believe
that he is someone that students should be made aware of because he is a huge
part of science and life today.
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