Home > History Fact Finder > Medicine and Disease - Who Invented Vaccination?
Medicine and Disease - Who Invented Vaccination?
Who invented vaccination?
Vaccination (introducing a substance into the body in order to produce immunity to a disease) may have been used in China, India, and Persia (present-day Iran) in ancient times. However, English doctor Edward Jenner (1749–1823) used the first recorded vaccination. He was inspired to develop the technique when he noticed that dairymaids (women who milk cows) in rural Gloucestershire who had previously been sick with cowpox (a contagious disease that causes blisters on the cow's udder and on the milkmaid's hand) did not catch smallpox, a disease similar to cowpox. Jenner wondered if the dairymaids had developed immunity to smallpox, which then often killed people in much-feared epidemics. Jenner tested his theory on an eight-year-old boy named Phipps. He took some matter from a milkmaid's cowpox vesicles (blisters) and injected it into the boy, who then developed temporary immunity (resistance) to...
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