CHANCE 



— John Hunter among them — took much interest in Jenner's 

 ideas about using cow-pox to vaccinate against smallpox and 

 his first tentative paper on the subject was returned to him 

 and apparently rejected. It was not till he was forty-seven years 

 old (in the memorable year 1796) that he made his first 

 successful vaccination from one human being to another. He 

 transferred material from a pustule on the hand of a milkmaid, 

 Sarah Nelmes, to an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps 

 who thereby gained fame in the same odd way as did Joseph 

 Meister for being the first person to receive Pasteur's treatment 

 for rabies nearly a century later.* This is taken as the classical 

 origin of vaccination but, as is often the case in the history of 

 scientific discovery, the issue is not clear-cut. At least two others 

 had actually performed it earUer but failed to follow it up. 

 Jenner continued his experiments, and in 1798 published his 

 famous Inquiry, reporting some twenty- three cases who were 

 either vaccinated or had contracted cow-pox naturally and were 

 subsequently shown to be immune to smallpox. Soon afterwards 

 vaccination was taken up widely and spread throughout the 

 world, despite severe opposition from certain quarters which 

 curiously and interestingly enough persists even to-day in a fairly 

 harmless form. Jenner suffered abuse but honours were soon 

 showered on him from all quarters of the globe. ^^' ^^ 



This history provides an admirable demonstration of how 

 difficult it usually is to recognise the true significance of a new 

 fact. Without knowing the full history one might well suppose 

 Jenner's contribution to medical science a very simple one not 

 meriting the fame subsequently bestowed on it. But neither John 

 Hunter nor any of Jenner's colleagues and contemporaries were 

 able to grasp the potentialities in advance, and similar oppor- 

 tunities had occurred and been let pass in other countries. There 

 was an interval of thirty years after the experimentally minded 

 Jenner himself became interested in the popular belief, before 

 he performed the classical, crucial experiments. With our present 

 conceptions of immunisation and of experimentation this may 

 appear surprising but we must remember how revolutionary the 

 idea was, even given the fact that variolation was an accepted 



* Meister remained at the Pasteur Institute as concierge until the occupa- 

 tion of Paris by the Germans in 1940, when he committed suicide. 



39 



