Edward jenner | Charles drew | Smallpox vaccine | Jonas salk | Smallpox | Salk vaccine

Fee is head of the History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. She has compiled these articles exclusively for EJournal USA.

Different cultures around the world have made efforts to protect people from infectious diseases in hundreds of years with varying degrees of success. Shows that the Chinese practiced podningstidspunktet against smallpox as early as 1000 BC The process was to take a scab from pox lesion, save it in a month, mix it with the installation, and then place the concoction on the nose of a patient.

Most of the patients so treated developed a milder form of the disease, and if and when they recovered, they were protected against future infection with smallpox. Similar practices were reported from India and Northern Africa in the 16 and 17 century. Some accounts credit Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British ambassador in ecumenical, bringing this practice from Turkey to Great Britain in the early 18 century. The procedure was risky, because they may be inoculated smallpox contract that can be fatal.

Country people in England had long been known that milkmaids would probably be saved for the ransacking of smallpox, and their resistance was otherwise associated with mild infection pox they tend to be acquired from cattle. Some doctors observed the same phenomenon, but Edward Jenner carried out experiments to test the relationship between cowpox and smallpox in 1796. He published his findings, and is generally credited with being the notice of vaccination.

Jenner experimented with taking some pus from a lesion in the hand of a milkmaid and inoculating it in the hand of a young boy. Some weeks later, Jenner inoculated the boy with the infectious material containing smallpox. Of course, human experiments will never be accepted today, but Jenner, and the boy was lucky. The experiment was a success that the boy is not sick, and Jenner concluded that inoculation of infectious material from a light touch of a disease can protect someone from a far more serious illness.

This is the principle of vaccination, although the scientific basis for it would not be understood for many decades.