The World: A Family History of Humanity

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

In May 1796, an English country doctor, Edward Jenner, noticing that milkmaids were immune to smallpox, scraped pus from a milkmaid’s cowpox blister and injected it into a boy, who himself became immune: he called this vaccination, after vacca, cow. As with many advances, the discovery was not recognized by most doctors. It took amateurs and then leaders to deliver the benefits to the public, and that often required decades. In 1801, Jefferson heard about vaccination from a Harvard professor who – astonishingly – had received the vaccine by post across the Atlantic and sent it in a corked vial to the president. Jefferson realized there was ‘no discovery in medicine equally valuable’ and ‘inoculated about 70 or 80 of my own family…Our whole experiment extended to about 200,’ including some of his children and three slaves, of whom two, his butler Burwell Colbert and blacksmith Joseph Fossett, were immunized successfully. The shock of vaccination was that it was a medicine for people who were not yet sick, leading to an anti-vaxxing movement. ‘As mindboggling as it is to contemplate a sitting president conducting experimental drug trials in his spare time’, writes Steven Johnson, it was appropriate that a non-doctor should defeat anti-vaxxers and promote the most important cure of modern times.