So the matter stood, when Jenner was
apprentice to a village doctor, and paid special
heed to the remark of a young country girl, that
as she had taken a pock from the cows, small-
pox would not hurt her. It had long been
known, in the great dairy farms of
Gloucestershire, that cows were affected with a
pustular disease that could be transferred to those
who milked them; and that persons by whom this
cow-pox had been taken, were unhurt by
exposure to the contagion of small-pox. In
Sweden and Holstein, some slight practical
notice was taken of the same fact while Jenner
was pondering upon it. In seventeen 'seventy,
when he became a pupil of John Hunter, he
spoke of his thought and his great hope to that
most eminent of teachers, and Hunter gave his
usual advice: "Don't think, but try; be patient,
be accurate." This advice Jenner followed,
and by careful experiment tested his belief
and elaborated the great life-saving truth that
the matter of cow-pox can be propagated from
one human being to another, and disseminated
over the globe, to the total extinction of small-pox.
He was giving up his life to study and
toil in this direction. As the first to arrest and
also to prove that the benefit of vaccination may
be diffused from man to man, and that direct
reference in every case to the disease of the cow
is not at all necessary for complete protection,
he especially acquired the claim he has on the
world's gratitude. The horse, the cow, the sheep,
the goat, and other animals, are liable to the same
pustular disease. In seventeen eighty-nine,
Jenner inoculated his eldest son with swine-pox
matter, and he was afterwards inoculated with
small-pox without any result. It has since been
found that the disease of these quadrupeds is
small-pox itself, modified by the constitution of
the animal. It has been observed, like the small-
pox in man, in every part of the world. The few
pustules on the udders of cows in the
Gloucestershire dairy farms, Jenner himself observed
to have been produced by transfer of the matter
on the hands of farm servants from the hoofs
of horses affected with what was called the
grease.

Jenner's discoveries were well received, only
by the best men of his profession. In the first
year of this nineteenth century he wrote that
upwards of six thousand persons had been
vaccinated with success. The practice was then
already extending over the globe, and in the
next year Jenner thought it "too manifest to
admit of controversy, that the annihilation of the
small-pox, the most dreadful scourge of the
human species, must be the final result of this
practice." A parliamentary committee investigated
and reported on the new discovery, in terms
of most emphatic approbation. A society,
called the Royal Jennerian, was formed, with
Jenner as its president, for the extermination
of small-pox, and opened in London thirteen
stations for the vaccination of the public. There
were preachers who taught that the disease
threatened with, extinction had been a merciful
gift of Providence for lessening the burden of a
poor man's family, and that it was impious to
interfere with the Divine appointment. Ehrmann,
of Frankfort, quoted the prophets and the
fathers of the Church, to prove that the vaccine
matter was Antichrist. A child at Peckham
was said to have been so changed in nature by
the introduction into its system of matter taken
from a cow, that it ran on all-fours, bellowed, and
butted. Dr. Rowley published five hundred cases
of the beastly new diseases produced from
cowpox, in a book illustrated by two coloured
engravings of the Cow-poxed, or Ox-faced, Boy. In
the sixth year of our century, the present Lord
Lansdowne, then Chancellor of the Exchequer,
moved that an inquiry into the state of vaccine
inoculation should be obtained from the College
of Physicians. The result was an inquiry by
that college, followed by a report affirming the
benefits of vaccination in the strongest terms.
Parliament then, in the seventh year of our
century, voted to Jenner, who had given life
and fortune to the cause he espoused, thirty
thousand pounds; and in the eighth year of the
century the National Vaccine Establishment
for public vaccination and gratuitous supply of
matter, or lymph, was founded, with the support
of an annual grant of two thousand pounds.

In the mean time, Jenner's essay, which
embodied his discovery, had been translated into
foreign languages, and had found its way to
North America, where President Jefferson, with
his own hand and the assistance of his sons-in-
law, vaccinated nearly two hundred of his
kindred and his neighbours. In the first year
of the century, vaccination was already general
in Spain, and two years afterwards the King of
Spain fitted out an expedition for the conveyance
of the discovery to all Spanish possessions
beyond the seas. This expedition, under the
conduct of Dr. Francis Xavier Balmis, spent
three years in carrying the discovery entirely
round the world.

In those days various experiments were made
in various countries for the inoculation of the
cow with human small-pox. Dr. Gassner, of
Guntzburg, and Dr. Keile, of Kazan in Russia,
succeeded in passing small-pox through the cow,
back in vaccine matter to the human system.
In Egypt, at a later period, the same was done;
but it is Mr. Ceely, of Aylesbury, working, like
Jenner, in the midst of the fatigues of practice,
who has demonstrated with most patience and
success that vaccine matter forming exactly the
true cow-pox pustules, is obtained from cows
inoculated with our small-pox. It has been
observed, indeed, by the Vaccination Committee
of the Medical Association that the pustules
obtained by this matter have a more marked
resemblance to the pustules described by Jenner
himself than is common in those produced from
the matter now in use.

The general result of the adoption of vaccination
is, that where one now dies of it in Denmark,
eleven used to die; where one now dies of it in
Berlin and a large part of Austria, twenty used
to die; and in Westphalia, five-and-twenty used
to die. Even in the cases where from any