Edward Jenner

Author Code: EEJX

Educated at Wotton-under-Edge and Cirencester, Jenner was apprenticed at the age of 14 to Daniel Ludlow, a surgeon at Chipping Sodbury. During his apprenticeship, Jenner learned surgical skills which allowed him to complete his medical training at St. George's Hospital in London. In 1722, he returned to Berkeley and established his own medical practice. Jenner's interests were not limited to medicine; geology and palaeontology were among his most avid hobbies, and his interests in the sphere of natural history led to his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1789. In 1798, Jenner published his first paper on vaccination with cowpox to prevent smallpox, one of the scourges and greatest killers of Jenner's time. To say the least, the paper was controversial. He followed with further research over the succeeding two years. Vaccination with cowpox became the standard procedure for dealing with smallpox and was made compulsory in England in 1853, although it had been introduced many years earlier in countries such as Denmark and Bavaria. Jenner's work laid the foundations for modern immunology.