Adjacent to Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, England, is this little thatch-roofed hut. This hut is the site where Edward Jenner first inoculated local farm boys with cow-pox as a method of preventing small pox in 1796.
Inoculation was not a new...

Adjacent to Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, England, is this little thatch-roofed hut. This hut is the site where Edward Jenner first inoculated local farm boys with cow-pox as a method of preventing small pox in 1796.

Inoculation was not a new invention, but Jenner was the first to discover the link between the cow-pox that sometimes infested milking cows and their attendants, and the small-pox that was so rampant and deadly, having observed that the women who showed signs of cow-pox generally didn’t fall victim to small pox. Jenner therefore speculated that having cow-pox would somehow give a person immunization against small-pox.

From Wikipedia:

On 14 May 1796, Jenner tested his hypothesis by inoculating James Phipps, a boy eight years old (the son of Jenner’s gardener), with pus scraped from the cowpox blisters on the hands of Sarah Nelmes, a milkmaid who had caught cowpox from a cow called Blossom, whose hide now hangs on the wall of the St George’s medical school library (now in Tooting). Phipps was the 17th case described in Jenner’s first paper on vaccination.

Jenner inoculated Phipps in both arms that day, subsequently producing in Phipps a fever and some uneasiness but no full-blown infection. Later, he injected Phipps with variolous material, the routine method of immunization at that time. No disease followed. The boy was later challenged with variolous material and again showed no sign of infection.

Photo by Coeurdelhistoire, Berkeley, England, 2010.