Jenner tests the first vaccine

Edward Jenner showed that cowpox exposure protected against smallpox — a deliberate infection preventing a worse one.

Why it matters

Vaccination is medicine's highest-yield intervention: a technology whose product is absence. Smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980 — the only human disease ever to be — by Jenner's idea carried global.

People

Edward Jenner

Threads

This event sits on Medicine.

Related events

• 1928 – 1945

  Fleming's mold, Florey's medicine

  Alexander Fleming noticed mold killing bacteria in 1928; a decade later Florey, Chain and wartime industry turned the observation into mass-produced penicillin.

  Medicine · europe

• 2020

  mRNA vaccines in a pandemic year

  Built on decades of Karikó and Weissman's work on modified RNA, COVID-19 vaccines were designed from a posted genome in days and authorized before the year ended.

  Medicine

• c. 850 CE – 1100

  Bimaristans: hospitals as institutions

  Endowed public hospitals — bimaristans — spread through the Islamic world, offering care regardless of creed, with wards, teaching and medical licensing.

  Medicine · middle east

Sources

• Encyclopædia Britannica — Edward Jenner