How Edward Jenner found vaccination?
Jenner's Observations:In the 18th century, Edward Jenner was a physician in England who noticed that milkmaids often had smooth skin, despite being exposed to cowpox, a mild disease that caused sores on the hands. He made the observation that milkmaids who had been infected with cowpox were immune to smallpox, a devastating disease with a high mortality rate.
His Experiment:
Jenner hypothesized that exposure to cowpox could confer immunity to smallpox. To test this, he conducted a famous experiment in 1796. He deliberately infected an 8-year-old boy named James Phipps with cowpox by making a shallow incision in the boy's arm and introducing cowpox material from a milkmaid's lesion.
The Result:
After developing mild symptoms of cowpox, James Phipps recovered and remained healthy. Two months later, Jenner deliberately exposed Phipps to smallpox, but the boy did not develop the disease. Jenner repeated the experiment with other subjects and consistently found that prior infection with cowpox protected individuals from smallpox.
The Discovery:
This discovery led to the development of the concept of vaccination, which involves introducing a weakened or inactivated form of a pathogen into a person to stimulate the body's immune system and provide protection against future infection. Jenner's groundbreaking work laid the foundation for the science of immunology and marked a significant turning point in the fight against infectious diseases.