Jenner went to school in Wotton-under-Edge and Cirencester. During this time he was inoculated for smallpox, which had a lifelong effect upon his general health. At the age of 14 he was apprenticed for seven years to Mr Daniel Ludlow, a surgeon of Chipping Sodbury, where he gained most of the experience needed to become a surgeon himself. In he moved to St. George's Hospital in London, to complete his medical training under the great surgeon and experimentalist John Hunter.
Hunter quickly recognised Edward's abilities at dissection and investigation, as well as his understanding of plant and animal anatomy. The two men were to remain lifelong friends and correspondents.
In at the age of 23, Edward Jenner returned to Berkeley and established himself as the local practitioner and surgeon. Although in later years he established medical practices in London and Cheltenham, Jenner remained essentially a resident of Berkeley for the rest of his life.
Like any other doctor of the time, Edward Jenner carried out variolation to protect his patients from smallpox. However, from the early days of his career Edward Jenner had been intrigued by country-lore which said that people who caught cowpox from their cows could not catch smallpox. This and his own experience of variolation as a boy and the risks that accompanied it led him to undertake the most important research of his life.
Cowpox is a mild viral infection of cows. It causes a few weeping spots pocks on their udders, but little discomfort. Milkmaids occasionally caught cowpox from the cows.
Although they felt rather off-colour for a few days and developed a small number of pocks, usually on the hand, the disease did not trouble them. In May a dairymaid, Sarah Nelmes, consulted Jenner about a rash on her hand. He diagnosed cowpox rather than smallpox and Sarah confirmed that one of her cows, a Gloucester cow called Blossom, had recently had cowpox. Edward Jenner realised that this was his opportunity to test the protective properties of cowpox by giving it to someone who had not yet suffered smallpox.
He chose James Phipps, the eight-year old son of his gardener. On 14th May he made a few scratches on one of James' arms and rubbed into them some material from one of the pocks on Sarah's hand.
A few days later James became mildly ill with cowpox but was well again a week later. So Jenner knew that cowpox could pass from person to person as well as from cow to person. Both the medical profession and the Royal Society were hostile to these unorthodox practices so Jenner published his observations in and travelled to London to publicize them.
His reception was so unenthusiastic that he returned to Gloucestershire leaving some lymph with Mr Cline, a surgeon at St Thomas's Hospital. Cline used it to inoculate a child who also proved immune to a later attempt at smallpox inoculation and this popularized the practice. Skip to content. Search the site. He died on 26 January Search term:.
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