Edward Jenner and the discovery of vaccinesEdward Jenner (1749-1823) trained in London, under John Hunter, and was a military surgeon for a period of time. Subsequently, he spent his entire career as a country doctor in his home county of Gloucestershire (West of England). His research was based on careful case studies and clinical observations more than a hundred years before scientists could explain what viruses and diseases really were. His innovative new method was so successful that by 1840 the British government had banned alternative preventative treatments for smallpox. [IMAGE] His invention of smallpox vaccination was the medical breakthrough that saved the most lives, before antibiotics came into mass use. Before Jenner's vaccine, smallpox was a deadly disease; most of his victims were infants and young children. In the twentieth century alone it killed more than 300 million people, about three times the number of deaths caused by all the wars and battles of that century combined. The latest reported case of smallpox occurred in Somalia. There, on October 26, 1977, a young man named Ali Maow Maalin recovered from a skin rash caused by smallpox. It was called the last case of natural smallpox in the world. In 1980, thanks to Jenner's discovery, the World Health Assembly officially declared "the world and its peoples" free from endemic smallpox. When Jenner began practicing medicine in Berkeley (Gloucestershire) he was asked a lot, to vaccinate people against smallpox. Inoculation was not a common practice in the English countryside until about 1768, when Robert Sutton (of Debenham, Suffolk) i...... middle of paper ......any - was his gift to the world. The word vaccination comes from the Latin 'vacca' meaning cow - in honor of the role the cow Blossom and Sarah played in Jenner's research. "Vaccination", the word invented by Jenner for its treatment, was adopted by Pasteur for immunization against any disease. We now know that one way to create a vaccine is to use an organism that is similar to the virulent organism but does not cause severe disease, as Jenner did with his use of the relatively mild cowpox virus to protect against the similar smallpox virus , but often lethal. A more modern example of this type of vaccine is the BCG vaccine used to protect against tuberculosis. Oddly enough, Jenner invented vaccination before doctors and scientists had a proper understanding of viruses and diseases..