Edward jenner early life

Edward jenner interesting facts

Edward Jenner was born in Berkeley, Gloucestershire on 17th May He was the eighth of the nine children born to the vicar of Berkeley, the Reverend Stephen Jenner, and his wife Sarah. Jenner went to school in Wotton-under-Edge and Cirencester. During this time he was inoculated for smallpox, which had a lifelong effect upon his general health.

At the age of 14 he was apprenticed for seven years to Mr Daniel Ludlow, a surgeon of Chipping Sodbury, where he gained most of the experience needed to become a surgeon himself. In he moved to St. George's Hospital in London, to complete his medical training under the great surgeon and experimentalist John Hunter. Hunter quickly recognised Edward's abilities at dissection and investigation, as well as his understanding of plant and animal anatomy.

The two men were to remain lifelong friends and correspondents. In at the age of 23, Edward Jenner returned to Berkeley and established himself as the local practitioner and surgeon. Although in later years he established medical practices in London and Cheltenham, Jenner remained essentially a resident of Berkeley for the rest of his life.

Like any other doctor of the time, Edward Jenner carried out variolation to protect his patients from smallpox. However, from the early days of his career Edward Jenner had been intrigued by country-lore which said that people who caught cowpox from their cows could not catch smallpox. This and his own experience of variolation as a boy and the risks that accompanied it led him to undertake the most important research of his life.

Cowpox is a mild viral infection of cows. It causes a few weeping spots pocks on their udders, but little discomfort. Milkmaids occasionally caught cowpox from the cows.