Edward Jrtwcr as Naturalist. 
47 
infected by a peculiar eruption upon the udder of the cow 
became by this secure from small-pox. He casually heard 
a young woman patient of his instructor say that she could 
not have sm;ffT-pox because she had had the cow-pox. In¬ 
stead of considering this view as merely superstitious or 
visionary, its importance, if it could be verified, at once 
took possession of .his mind. He was surrounded — the 
nation was then and always filled—by small-pox in its most 
virulent and fatal form. Dr. Turner will have told you 
that at the time not more than four persons in one hundred 
wholly escaped its ravages. It destroyed a tenth part of 
all that were born, and frightfully disfigured where it did 
not kill. The strength of man was weakened and the beauty 
of woman very generally obliterated. The youth undoubt¬ 
edly felt already that, could he but develop this milkmaid’s 
crude belief, a supreme victory would be wrested from the 
angel of death. His master and his master’s professional 
friends, who must have been told of it, undoubtedly laughed 
the enthusiastic boy to scorn. Even the magnificence of 
the idea, chimerical as it must have seemed, could not have 
been half appreciated by them. That true cow-pox was 
but a single one of several eruptions upon the udder of the 
cow, that it was the only one efficacious as a small-pox 
preventive, and that it was extremely rare even then, the 
disease often disappearing from the herds for years, so that 
those that are found spontaneously affected with it are now 
considered of great pecuniary value, and that cow-pox once 
contracted by man or woman was artificially communicable 
to others of our species were facts then wholly unknown. 
They were successively discovered by Jenner, and form 
essential parts of the boon that he conferred upon humanity. 
It is well that I should state at this point, to prepare 
you for the subsequent analysis of his character, that though, 
as a youth and subsequently, he sought verbally the opin¬ 
ions of those to whom he was in the habit of looking for 
instruction and advice, it was more than ten years later, 
in May, 1780, that he imparted to his friend. Edward Gard- 
