As history tells it, young Edward Jenner heard a milkmaid say she'd had cowpox so couldn't get smallpox. And thus his idea for a vaccine was born. Now a researcher has fact-checked the tale.

As history tells it, young Edward Jenner heard a milkmaid brag that having cowpox made her immune to smallpox. And years later, as a doctor, he drew matter from a cowpox postule on the arm of milkmaid ...

Young Jenner faced about a 2% chance of dying of smallpox thanks to his variolation. That's pretty horrifying compared with the safety standards of modern vaccines, but it offered better odds than ...

Edward Jenner figured out the connection between smallpox and humans from a milkmaid’s blistered hands. But it turns out cows aren’t actually the key to smallpox immunity.

Edward Jenner administers a vaccine in James Gillray's 1802 caricature of patients who feared it would make ... “The cowpox experiment with the boy is the one all the books referred to and that ...

An illustration of Dr. Edward Jenner making history by inoculating an 8-year-old boy with cowpox virus, the first operation of its kind. Three Lions/Getty Images ...

Edward Jenner is often called “the father of immunology ... Jenner was among five individuals in England and Germany in the 1770s who were interested in the use of material from cowpox and how ...

Jenner inoculated 8 year old James Phipps with pus from the cowpox blisters of Sarah Nelmes, a milkmaid who had caught cowpox from Blossom the cow. Phipps suffered a fever, but no other symptoms.

On May 14, 1796, Englishman Edward Jenner tested vaccination on a human subject. ... On May 14, 1796, Jenner took fluid from a cowpox blister on milkmaid Sarah Nelmes.

The best-known version of the smallpox-vaccine story goes like this: In 1796, the British doctor Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids exposed to a mild disease called cowpox were unusually ...

As history tells it, young Edward Jenner heard a milkmaid say she'd had cowpox so couldn't get smallpox. And thus his idea for a vaccine was born. Now a researcher has fact-checked the tale.