Jenner's First Vaccination History

The history of vaccines and immunization began in 1796 when Edward Jenner, a doctor living in Berkeley, England, performed the world’s first vaccination (Stern & Markel, 2005). Jenner “took pus from a cow pox lesion on a milkmaid’s hand” and “inoculated an eight-year-old boy” (Stern & Markel, 2005, p.612). Six weeks later, Jenner again inoculated two sites on the boys arm and he was unaffected. This was the beginning of vaccines and expanded greatly in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries.
History of Vaccine Discovery According to Stern and Markel (2005), “Jenner applied the scientific methods of observation and experimentation” which “ultimately conducted one of the world’s first clinical trials” (p. 612). Jenner’s discovery of the vaccine concept relied on his knowledge of local farming communities and outbreaks of smallpox that affected the area. Louis Pasteur, a scientist, discovered his first vaccine in 1879, with a disease called chicken cholera. He accidentally exposed chickens to a form of a culture and he observed and demonstrated that they became resistant to the actual virus. Pasteur went on to use this theory to develop causes and vaccinations for diseases such as TB, smallpox, cholera and anthrax. Pasteur next discovered the rabies vaccine in 1885. Then, vaccines against tetanus, diphtheria, plague, tuberculosis …show more content…
The history of vaccines and active immunization began when Edward Jenner performed the world’s first vaccination and inoculated a boy with cowpox and prevented subsequent smallpox and that was the beginning of live, attenuated vaccines (Plotkin, 2011). Louis Pasteur attenuated the first organism 80 years later in a laboratory. According to Plotkin (2011), “The next signal advance in vaccine development occurred later in the nineteenth century in the USA and in Pasteur’s Institute, and that was the chemical inactivation of whole bacteria” (p.