THE FIRST FORGOTTEN VACCINATION

 

On May 14, 1796, Edwar Jenner inoculated eight-year-old James Phipps, the son of Jenner's gardener, to fight smallpox. He scraped the pus from the cowpox blisters on the hands of Sarah Nelmes, a milkmaid who contracted the disease from a cow named Blossom (whose skin now hangs on the wall of the library at St George's Medical School in Tooting ). Thus began the era of vaccination, but Jenner was not the first to try this method to combat smallpox.

Jenner's vaccination procedure had previously been devised and used by someone else: Benjamin Jesty. This happened in 1774, in a village called Yetminster near Sherborne, UK. He was a tenant farmer who was restless and intelligent. His whole life was dedicated to the field, although he never owned his land. In his youth he worked as a milker on several farms, and on one occasion he contracted cowpox, chickenpox, a disease that in farm animals appears as pustules on the udders, and that in humans causes small blisters on the hands and his arms, which according to popular knowledge would give him resistance against a much worse disease: smallpox.

In 1774, Jesty was 37 years old and had been married for 4 years to Elizabeth, 35; They had two sons, Robert (3 years old), Benjamin (2 years old) and a young daughter, Elizabeth. Jesty was born in the town of Yetminster, Dorset, England. He became a dairy farmer and was a member of the Yetminster vestry. Here his duties included organizing medical care for the poor.

Smallpox was a constant threat at that time, since the scourge of the so-called spotted monster disappeared and reappeared every so often. Jesty was an overseer of the poor, and attended the Yetminster vestry meetings. The practice of offering protection against infection by the deliberate induction of modified diseases originated in China in the 10th century with the intranasal application (insufflation) of powdered pox scabs. A derivative of the Turkish variolation became known as "the inoculation". This procedure had been advocated by the nobility since 1722, when Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the English ambassador, returned to England from Constantinople, Turkey, where she witnessed this method of preventing smallpox. However, this dangerous technique of seeding skin incisions with live smallpox material was not popular with the working classes. As many as one in 50 inoculation recipients died as a result of the procedure, and the process sometimes introduced disease where it had not previously been active. However, faced with a smallpox epidemic that began in the autumn of 1771, the Yetminster vestry decided that something must be done.

He had personally met the local doctors and apothecaries and understood the risks of variolation. Instead, the stories of people avoiding smallpox through acquiring cowpox were well known in farming communities. The milkmaids were admired for their flawless complexion as they did not suffer from this disease. Jesty had acquired cowpox while working with cattle when she was young. His idea that cowpox could prevent smallpox was strengthened through discussion with two of his milkmaids, Anne Notley and Mary Reade. Both had been infected with cowpox as a result of working as milkers. Neither woman had contracted smallpox, even living with sick people.

Faced with a local outbreak of smallpox in 1774, Jesty had the idea of inoculating his family with cowpox as a safer alternative to the conventional variolation method. Jesty decided to try inoculation using the pus from the pustules of sick cows instead of the pox scabs from a sick person. For this he decided to test his family, they had to access cowpox in Elford's herd, which he knew were sick. The family will walk a minimum of 7.4 km to reach the farm where the sick cows were.

Faced with a local outbreak of smallpox in 1774, Jesty had the idea of inoculating his family with cowpox as a safer alternative to the conventional variolation method. Jesty decided to try inoculation using pus from cow pustules instead of pox scabs from a sick person. For this he decided to test his family, they had to access cowpox in Elford's herd, which he knew were sick. The family walked a minimum of 7.4 km to reach the farm. Upon reaching the herd, Jesty searched their udders for cowpox lesions. Using a sock needle, he transferred material from an injury to her wife's arm, inserting it into her skin just below her elbow. He then repeated this procedure on the two children, puncturing just above the elbow in each case.

Elizabeth soon developed a fever and her arm became swollen. She called Dr. Trowbridge and Mr. Meech, and Jesty was forced to tell them what he had done. She recovered quickly, but the news soon spread to neighboring medical and clerical fraternities. Jesty was vilified by locals, who subjected him to verbal and sometimes physical abuse when he attended markets. Cattle markets were held regularly in Dorset at Sherborne, Blandford, Shaftesbury, and Dorchester; these places offered an effective means of transmitting gossip. Jesty became an object of scorn and ridicule. In rural areas, people were often superstitious and treated anything unusual as abhorrent. The last execution for witchcraft had taken place only 62 years before Jesty's act. Despite the unwanted attention, Jesty steadfastly continued with his parochial duties. The vaccinated trio remained free of smallpox, despite being exposed to epidemics of the disease. His two sons were variolated by Trowbridge in 1789. Robert, then 18, and Benjamin, 17, were unaffected by this challenge with the smallpox inoculum.

Thanks to pressure from local people, Jesty and her family moved to Downshay Manor, near Worth Matravers, in 1797. Understandably, she made no attempt to seek publicity until she learned of the magnitude of Jenner's first prize. A friend, upon learning of this fact, later documented an account of Jesty's vaccinations. His friend, an avid vaccinator, felt that Jesty's efforts were also rewarded. These efforts did not give the farmer the recognition they hoped for.

Jenner is recognized for discovering vaccination not for an isolated event. When he vaccinated him in 1796 he went with a public demonstration of his method. Jenner had already done the documentation work, gathering a large number of testimonies from people who suffered from cowpox and who later became immune. In fact, when the letter where he explained his method was rejected by the Royal Society, he went on to collect information and publish a book on his discoveries. Jenner also had criticisms, but they were not as severe as those suffered by Jesty. Although it remains the question if Jenner had learned of the gossip from the farming community about Jesty.

In 1805, Jesty accepted a formal invitation to attend the Original Vaccine Pock Institute in London. Jesty saw no reason to dress differently in London than in the country. The members of the Institute had a lot of fun with her old-fashioned appearance. Robert, the eldest son (then 28 years old), also made the trip to London and agreed to be inoculated with smallpox again to show that he still had immunity. Although Benjamin Jesty's only life experience was that of a farmer in a rural community, Jesty had based his experiment on a plausible hypothesis formed from his personal observations and experience, evident in the Institute officials' report in 1805.