50 Fun Facts About Edward Jenner

In which Gloucestershire town was Edward Jenner born in 1749?

He was the eighth of nine children of the local vicar and later served the town as mayor and magistrate.

What was the profession of Jenner's father?

The Reverend Stephen Jenner's position gave his son a strong basic education at schools in Wotton-under-Edge and Cirencester.

What procedure did the young Jenner undergo at school that affected his health for life?

The deliberate infection with smallpox matter was the standard protection of the day, and its risks helped motivate his later search for something safer.

At 13, Jenner was apprenticed for seven years to a surgeon in which town?

Daniel Ludlow gave him most of the experience he needed before he went to London at 21.

Under which famous surgeon did Jenner train at a London hospital from 1770?

Hunter passed on William Harvey's advice, 'Don't think; try', and later proposed Jenner for the Royal Society.

Which three-word piece of advice did Hunter pass to Jenner?

William Osler recorded it as William Harvey's maxim, typical of the Age of Enlightenment.

From which university did Jenner obtain his MD in 1792?

By then he had twenty years of general practice and surgery behind him in Berkeley.

Jenner's local club of physicians took its nickname from the inn where it met. What was it called?

Members dined in the parlour of the Fleece Inn at Rodborough and read papers; Jenner's covered angina and heart valves and mentioned cowpox.

Jenner was elected to the Royal Society in 1788 for a study of which bird?

He combined observation, experiment and dissection, and his nephew helped with the fieldwork.

What did Jenner discover that the newly hatched brood parasite does soon after hatching?

He found a hollow in the chick's back that vanishes after 12 days, an anatomical tool for the job; people had assumed the adult did it.

Which Victorian artist's observation of a blind brood-parasite nestling convinced Darwin that Jenner had been right?

Darwin revised a later edition of On the Origin of Species on the strength of her description and drawing.

How may Jenner have met his wife Catherine Kingscote in the 1780s?

They married in March 1788 and had three children; she died of tuberculosis in 1815.

Which aristocrat imported variolation to Britain in 1721 after seeing it in Constantinople?

Voltaire claimed the Turks borrowed the custom from the Circassians; Shetland's Johnnie Notions later devised his own method.

Which Dorset farmer vaccinated his family with cowpox in 1774, two decades before Jenner?

At least five investigators in England and Germany tried cowpox before Jenner, but only his work made the method understood.

On what date did Jenner carry out his famous first vaccination?

He inoculated the boy through two small cuts on the arm; a fever followed but no full-blown infection.

Who was James Phipps, the first person Jenner vaccinated?

Phipps was case 17 in Jenner's first paper, and Jenner later gave him a free lease on a cottage in Berkeley.

Which milkmaid supplied the cowpox pus that Jenner scraped from her hands?

She had caught cowpox from a cow named Blossom, whose hide hangs in the St George's medical school library and whose horns are in Jenner's house.

What was the name of the cow that infected the milkmaid in Jenner's experiment?

Her hide now hangs on the wall of the St George's Medical School library in Tooting.

How did Jenner prove Phipps was immune after the cowpox inoculation?

Donald Hopkins argues this proof of immunity, plus arm-to-arm transfer of cowpox, was Jenner's real contribution.

The words 'vaccine' and 'vaccination' come from Jenner's Latin term for cowpox. What was it?

It means 'pustules of the cow', from vacca, and appeared in the title of his 1798 Inquiry.

How many cases did Jenner analyse in his 1798 Inquiry, the pamphlet that named cowpox in Latin?

They included his own 11-month-old son Robert; his first informal report to the Royal Society in 1797 had been sceptically received.

How much did Parliament grant Jenner for his vaccination work in 1802?

A further £20,000 followed five years later after the Royal College of Physicians confirmed the vaccine worked.

Which Spanish mission of 1803–06 carried Jenner's vaccine to the Americas, Philippines and China?

Jenner wrote that history offered no example of philanthropy 'so noble, so extensive'.

What did Napoleon do at Jenner's request while France was at war with Britain?

Napoleon, who had all his troops vaccinated and gave Jenner a medal, said he could not refuse anything to 'one of the greatest benefactors of mankind'.

In which year did the British government ban variolation and offer cowpox vaccination free of charge?

Compulsory infant vaccination followed in England with the Vaccination Act of 1853.

Which small state became the first in the world to make smallpox vaccination compulsory, in 1806?

Elisa Bonaparte's Lucca and Piombino followed six months later, then Bavaria in 1807.

To which monarch was Jenner appointed physician extraordinary in 1821?

The same year he became mayor of Berkeley and a justice of the peace.

What did Jenner present to the Royal Society in 1823, the last year of his life?

He never abandoned natural history; his earlier medical papers had covered angina, ophthalmia and heart valve disease.

How did Jenner die in January 1823?

Found paralysed on his right side on 25 January, he died the next day aged 73 and was buried in the family vault at St Mary's, Berkeley.

In which year did the World Health Organization declare smallpox eradicated?

The last natural case was diagnosed in October 1977; smallpox remains the only human disease ever eradicated.

Where are the two remaining official stocks of the smallpox virus kept?

Every other known stock was destroyed or transferred after Janet Parker's fatal laboratory infection in Birmingham in 1978.

Who was the last person to die of smallpox, in 1978?

The virus escaped from a research laboratory at the University of Birmingham Medical School.

In 1939 vaccinia, the smallpox vaccine virus, was shown to be distinct from cowpox. Which virus is it closest to?

Whole-genome sequencing revealed the link; British cowpox strains are the least related to vaccinia.

Who gave the generic name 'vaccines' to artificially weakened pathogens in honour of Jenner?

Unlike Jenner's naturally mild cowpox, Pasteur's chicken cholera and anthrax organisms were weakened in the laboratory.

How was the smallpox vaccine mainly transmitted from 1796 to the 1880s?

Calf lymph vaccine took over in the 1880s, and egg-grown vaccine arrived in the 1930s and 40s.

According to the biography, roughly what share of the world's people did smallpox kill in Jenner's era?

The figure rose to about 20% in crowded towns and cities where infection spread more easily.

Which body, founded in London in 1803 to promote vaccination, did Jenner serve as president?

It ceased operating in 1809; Jenner later resigned from the government's National Vaccine Establishment in protest at its leadership.

A statue of Jenner was erected in Trafalgar Square and later moved where?

Another statue stands in Gloucester Cathedral, and Tokyo National Museum put one up for the 1896 centenary of vaccination.

Jenner's 1999 Royal Mail 'World Changers' stamp issue paired him with which three Britons?

He was also voted into the BBC's 100 Greatest Britons in 2002, and a lunar crater and minor planet 5168 carry his name.

Which spot near the Gloucestershire village of Uley is locally called 'Smallpox Hill'?

It may have played a part in Jenner's studies of the disease.

Jenner's name is carried by a vaccine research centre at which university?

A group of villages in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, including Jennerstown, also carries his name.

How old was Jenner's son Robert when his father vaccinated him with cowpox?

Robert was one of the 23 cases in the 1798 Inquiry and lived until 1854.

Edward Jenner was which of his parents' nine children?

His father, the Reverend Stephen Jenner, was vicar of Berkeley, which gave the boy a strong basic education.

Jenner's wife Catherine died in 1815 of which disease?

They had married in March 1788 and had three children together.

Besides vaccination, Jenner is credited with advancing understanding of which heart condition?

He wrote to Heberden about 'how much the heart must suffer from the coronary arteries not being able to perform their functions'.

Which English physician had realised by 1768 that cowpox infection protected against smallpox?

At least five investigators in England and Germany tested cowpox on humans between 1770 and 1791, before Jenner.

How large was the second grant Parliament gave Jenner in 1807, after the Royal College of Physicians backed vaccination?

It followed a £10,000 award five years earlier, sought with the support of King George III.

In 1806 Jenner was elected a foreign member of the academy of sciences of which country?

He had already been made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1802.

Which civic offices did Jenner hold in his home town alongside his royal appointment in 1821?

The same year he became physician extraordinary to George IV.

Where was Jenner buried after his death in January 1823?

He was found paralysed on his right side on 25 January and died the next day, aged 73, of an apparent second stroke.