Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 6.djvu/94

 264 WORKMEN AND HEROES doubts, however, were removed, as a boy, who daily saw the girl, fell ill and died, " having had a very bad small-pox of the confluent sort." This is the first use of the word vaccination, or, more familiarly, cow-pox, which is an eruption arising from the insertion into the system of matter obtained from the eruption on the teats and udders of cows, and especially in Gloucestershire ; it is also frequently denominated vaccine matter ; and the whole affair, inoculation and its conse- quences, is called vaccination, from the Latin vacca, a cow. It is admitted that Jenner's merit lay in the scientific application of his knowledge of the fact that the chapped hands of milkers of cows sometimes proved a preventive of small-pox, and from those of them whom he endeavored to inoculate resisting the infection. These results were probably known far be- yond Jenner's range, and long before his time ; for we have respectable testimony of their having come within the observation of a Cheshire gentleman, who had been informed of them shortly after settling on his estate in Prestbury parish, in or about 1 740. This does not in the least detract from Jenner's merit, but shows that to his genius for observation, analogy, and experiment, we are indebted for this application of a simple fact, only incidentally remarked by others, but by Jenner rendered the stepping-stone to his great discovery or, in other words, ex- tending its benefits from a single parish in Gloucestershire to the whole world. We agree with a contemporary, that, "among all the names which ought to be consecrated by the gratitude of mankind, that of Jenner stands pre-eminent It would be difficult, we are inclined to say impossible, to select from the cata- logue of benefactors to human nature an individual who has contributed so largely to the preservation of life, and to the alleviation of suffering. Into what- ever corner of the world the blessing of printed knowledge has penetrated, there also will the name of Jenner be familiar ; but the fruits of his discovery have ri- pened in barbarous soils, where books have never been opened, and where the savage does not pause to inquire from what source he has derived relief. No im- provement in the physical sciences can bear a parallel with that which ministers in every part of the globe to the prevention of deformity, and, in a great propor- tion, to the exemption from actual destruction." The ravages which the small-pox formerly committed are scarcely conceived or recollected by the present generation. An instance of death occurring after vaccination is now eagerly seized and commented upon ; yet seventy years have not elapsed since this disease might fairly be termed the scourge of mankind, and an enemy more extensive and more insidious than even the plague. A family blighted in its fairest hopes through this terrible visitation was an every-day spec- tacle : the imperial House of Austria lost eleven of its offspring in fifty years. This instance is mentioned because it is historical ; but in the obscure and unre- corded scenes of life this pest was often a still more merciless intruder. Edward Jenner was the third son of the Vicar of' Berkeley, in Gloucestershire, where he was born, May 17, 1 749. Before he was nine years of age he showed a growing taste for natural history, in forming a collection of the nests of the dor- mouse ; and when at school at Cirencester he was fond of searching for fossils.