For most of human history a contagious disease was simply fate. This is the 200-year story of one stubborn idea, from Jenner's cowpox to a strand of mRNA, told as a history of methods and ending on the one disease erased from the earth, smallpox.
Who's who
- Edward Jenner+1 more episodeEnglish physician who used cowpox against smallpox in 1796
- James PhippsEight-year-old first person deliberately vaccinated by Jenner
- Lady Mary Wortley MontaguAristocrat who brought smallpox inoculation to England from Constantinople
- OnesimusEnslaved African man who described inoculation to Cotton Mather in Boston
- Zabdiel BoylstonBoston physician who ran the first systematic colonial variolation
- Louis Pasteur+1 more episodeFrench microbiologist who treated rabies with aged nerve tissue in 1885
- Waldemar HaffkineDeveloper of the first human cholera vaccine
- Max TheilerDeveloper of the yellow fever 17D strain
Where it happens
- Constantinople+1 more episodeWhere Montagu observed variolation in 1718
- Boston, Massachusetts+11 more episodesSite of the 1721 colonial variolation during an epidemic
- SomaliaLocation of the last natural smallpox case in 1977
Timeline
- 1718Montagu has her son inoculated in Constantinople
- 1796Jenner inoculates James Phipps with cowpox
- 1885Pasteur treats Joseph Meister for rabies
- 1955Salk polio vaccine licensed
- May 1980WHO declares smallpox eradicated
- December 2020First mRNA COVID-19 vaccines authorized
Still debated
Almost every "first vaccine" claim hides a caveat, since variolation and Benjamin Jesty precede Jenner and first-in-human, first-published and first-licensed are different milestones. Whose names survive in the record, including Onesimus and child test subjects, is itself contested, and smallpox is the exception, not the rule.
