Throughout the ages, smallpox, now known to be caused by a virus, was a serious, and often deadly, disease that had spread ...

This practice became widely accepted but was eventually superseded by Jenner's work based on the hypothesis derived from widespread observation and first formulated in 1798 that cowpox infection ...

The concept of vaccines first emerged in the 18th century when Dr. Edward Jenner purposely gave a young boy cowpox. Jenner, ...

It was quite a victory, then, when English physician Edward Jenner developed an inoculation against smallpox in 1796. Armed with the knowledge that milkmaids who had been exposed to cowpox ...

A young milkmaid had told him how people who contracted cowpox, a harmless disease easily picked up during contact with cows, never got smallpox, a deadly scourge. With this in mind, Jenner took ...

Jenner hypothesised protection was due to contact with cowpox lesions and went on to test his theory on an eight-year-old boy called James Phipps. In 1796 he immunised James with fluid from a ...

Jenner noted that his milkmaids did not get smallpox. He suspected that they were prevented from getting the disease because they had previously contracted cowpox (a disease similar to smallpox ...

And this is where Edward Jenner comes in. Jenner noticed that milkmaids who caught cowpox – a disease related to smallpox but far more mild – didn’t catch smallpox. This gave Jenner an idea ...

The smallpox vaccine is not a form of variola virus, but a preparation of vaccinia (a form of cowpox) virus. In 1796, Edward Jenner, a British physician, demonstrated that infection caused by ...