An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae
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- Englisch ausgewählt
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Beschreibung
Produktdetails
Einband
Taschenbuch
Erscheinungsdatum
11.05.2027
Verlag
W. Frederick ZimmermanSeitenzahl
118
Maße (L/B/H)
22,9/15,2/0,6 cm
Gewicht
170 g
Sprache
Englisch
EAN
9798259504103
In 1798 Edward Jenner, a physician of Berkeley in Gloucestershire, printed at his own expense the seventy-five pages reproduced here. In twenty-three case histories he set out his finding that the cow pox, caught from cattle, protects against smallpox, and that the protection passes safely from person to person. It is the founding document of vaccination, the ancestor of every vaccine since, and the first chapter in the only eradication of a human disease yet achieved. To understand why a slim book about cattle disease became one of the most consequential medical texts ever printed, one must understand what smallpox was. For most of recorded history it was the great killer. Caused by the variola virus, it spread readily from person to person, ran a course of fever and a disfiguring eruption of pustules, and killed perhaps a third of those it infected; those who survived were often left scarred, blinded, or both. It respected no rank - it killed reigning monarchs and peasant children alike - and in the eighteenth century it is estimated to have caused some four hundred thousand deaths a year in Europe alone. In populations that had never met it, brought into contact through trade and conquest, its mortality was catastrophic, and it had reshaped the demography of whole continents. To be alive before Jenner was to expect, sooner or later, to face the smallpox. The one defense that long predated Jenner was variolation, also called inoculation. It had been practiced for centuries in Asia and Africa: matter taken from the pustules of a person with a mild case of smallpox was introduced into a small wound in a healthy person, who then, it was hoped, suffered a milder attack and was thereafter immune. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had observed the practice in Constantinople, championed its introduction to Britain in the 1720s, and over the following decades variolation became widespread among those who could afford it. But the method was perilous. It gave the recipient real smallpox, which sometimes proved severe or fatal; and the inoculated person was contagious, capable of seeding fresh epidemics. Variolation reduced an individual's risk while sustaining the disease in the community. A safer route was badly wanted. That route came, as Jenner's title announces, from the cow. In the dairy counties of the west of England it was country knowledge that milkers sometimes caught a mild eruption on their hands from sores on the udders of cattle - the cow pox, variolae vaccinae - and that those who had had it seemed proof against the smallpox. Jenner was neither the first to notice this nor the first to act on it; a Dorset farmer, Benjamin Jesty, had inoculated his own family with cow pox in 1774. Jenner's distinction was that he investigated the claim systematically and published the result so that others could repeat it. He observed, he reasoned, and then he conducted the deliberate trial that turns a belief into evidence. The central experiment is the one for which the book is remembered. On 14 May 1796 Jenner took matter from a cow-pox lesion on the hand of a young dairymaid, Sarah Nelmes, who had caught the infection from a cow named Blossom, and with it inoculated James Phipps, the healthy eight-year-old son of his gardener. The boy developed a mild local reaction and recovered. Then came the decisive and, by modern standards, ethically fraught step: in July, Jenner inoculated Phipps with matter from a genuine smallpox pustule. Had the cow pox not protected him, the boy would have taken the smallpox. No disease developed. Jenner repeated the smallpox challenge later, again without effect.
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