Edward Jenner's Contribution To Medicine.

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Edward Jenner (1749) was an English physician and discoverer of vaccination against smallpox. Born to a local vicar, Jenner spent most of his career in his hometown, Gloucestershire. While he was still young, Jenner was an apprentice for Daniel Ludlow (who was a surgeon) since the age of 14 till he was 22. After he was trained in London by John Hunter and later returned to Berkeley, Gloucestershire in 1773. Jenner developed vaccination when a milkmaid went to see him about a rash on her hand that had developed due to cowpox. It had been a myth from the countryside that when suffering from cowpox, you will never suffer from smallpox (which was a great killer at the time). Jenner thought about this and carried out an investigation on his gardeners’ son, James Phipps (8 years old). Jenner inserted pus taken from a cowpox pustule and inserted it into an incision on the boy's arm. When tested, James developed a mild case of cowpox, but did not catch smallpox. The experiment was successful, so Jenner wrote to The Royal Society in 1797 describing his experiment, but was told that his ideas were too revolutionary and that he needed more proof. This led to Jenner experimenting 23 more times and all cases being successful. In 1798, the results were finally published and Jenner coined the word vaccine from the Latin 'vacca' for cow. Due to Edward Jenner’s discovery, the nasty disease of smallpox (that was such a fatal and widespread problem at the time) was solved and there was almost always a guaranteed protection of immunity by the simple vaccination of cowpox. Jenner also introduced new foundations of modern

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