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Smallpox
Published in Scott M. Jackson, Skin Disease and the History of Dermatology, 2023
Enter Edward Jenner (1749–1823). Jenner was an English physician from Gloucestershire who once apprenticed under the great English surgeon John Hunter. He had diverse interests in such fields as zoology (he studied and published research on the cuckoo bird), geology, poetry, and hot air balloons. According to the oft-repeated legend, Jenner's contributions to the history of smallpox began with a conversation between a 13-year-old Jenner and a milkmaid who told him that she could not get smallpox because she had had cowpox. Cowpox was an ulcerative disease of cow udders that caused blisters, pustules, and ulcers of the hand and arm, along with swollen glands and fever, resulting from direct contact with the cow's infected parts. Because milkmaids were known for their beauty and flawless complexion, Jenner subsequently got the idea to variolate a person with cowpox in order to prevent smallpox. The term he used for this process is vaccination, a word that derives from the Latin vacca, meaning cow. The practice of vaccination was preferable to variolation because it was much safer and could not trigger an outbreak of smallpox.
The Milkmaid's Legacy
Published in Norman Begg, The Remarkable Story of Vaccines, 2023
Variolation did provide some immunity to smallpox, but it didn’t stop the spread of the disease, as a variolated person could pass the disease onto others. It was also a highly dangerous procedure, as it could produce full-blown smallpox – two to three percent of people who were variolated died of the disease. No-one was able to escape smallpox – with one exception. Milkmaids seemed to be immune to smallpox. When an epidemic of smallpox arrived, they miraculously survived – either not catching it all, or having a very mild illness. There are numerous references in art and literature to “the beautiful milkmaid”, their skin unblemished by smallpox scars. It was believed that they developed their immunity from catching cowpox while milking their herds. Cowpox is similar to smallpox, but much less severe. It seemed that once exposed to cowpox, the maids were immune to its more unpleasant cousin, smallpox. In 1774, Benjamin Jesty, a farmer from Dorset, decided to protect his family during a smallpox epidemic. He took some pus from the udders of one of his cows that had cowpox, and, using one of his wife’s stocking needles, injected his wife and two children. None of them caught smallpox. Jesty wanted to protect his family, but unlike Jenner, he had no interest in the science behind what he had done, and his experiment was never published. He suffered a great deal of abuse from the local community, forcing him and his family to flee their home; it was only thirty years later that his contribution would be acknowledged by the quirkily named Original Vaccine Pock Institute, another learned society.
Immunization
Published in Julius P. Kreier, Infection, Resistance, and Immunity, 2022
Michael F. Para, Susan L. Koletar, Carter L. Diggs
If living attenuated vaccines are used, they often generate a wide variety of antigens which will induce a broadly reactive immune response that reacts with antigens in a variety of strains of the pathogen. The cowpox virus which served as a vaccine to protect from smallpox is an example of a living agent that protects against a heterologous infection. Live vaccines which elicit humoral and cell-mediated immune responses against many different antigens and multiple epitopes are often broadly protective.
A Belgian student with black eschars
Published in Acta Clinica Belgica, 2023
Astrid Van Reempts, Liesbet De Meester, Koen Blot, Ann-Sophie Candaele, Hilde Beele, Jo Van Dorpe, Diana Huis in ‘t Veld
Human cowpox is a rare viral zoonosis. Cowpox virus is a member of the Orthopoxvirus genus, like the variola (smallpox) virus which was globally eradicated in 1980 by mass vaccination. Cowpox virus is endemic in wildlife in Europe and the adjacent parts of Asia. Despite the name, the asymptomatic natural reservoir hosts are wild rodents, especially bank voles and wood mice [1–3]. Historically, the name of the cowpox virus derives from the fact that animal to human transmission of this virus was observed in dairy maids who had direct contact with lesions on teats of infected cows, although infections in cows are not common [3]. Its resemblance to the mild form of smallpox and the observation that dairy farmers were immune to smallpox, inspired the English physician Edward Jenner to create the smallpox vaccine. The word ‘vaccination’, mentioned for the first time by Jenner in 1796, is derived from ‘vaccinus’ a Latin adjective, meaning ‘of or from the cow’ [4].