Edward Jenner Jenner was born on 17 May 1749 (6 May Old Style) in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, as the eighth of nine children. His father, the Reverend Stephen Jenner, was the vicar of Berkeley, so Jenner received a strong basic education. He went to school in Wotton-under-Edge and Cirencester. During this time, he was inoculated for smallpox, which had a lifelong effect upon his general health. (Crucially this meant that he underwent variolation and not vaccination.) At the age of 14, he was apprenticed for seven years to Daniel Ludlow, a surgeon of Chipping Sodbury, South Gloucestershire, where he gained most of the
Edward Jenner of nestling birds in general." Jenner's nephew assisted in the study. He was born on 30 June 1737. Jenner's understanding of the cuckoo's behaviour was not entirely believed until the artist Jemima Blackburn, a keen observer of bird life, saw a blind nestling pushing out a host's egg. Her description and illustration of this were enough to convince Charles Darwin to revise a later edition of "On the Origin of Species". Jenner married Catherine Kingscote (died 1815 from tuberculosis) in March 1788. He might have met her while he and other fellows were experimenting with balloons. Jenner's trial balloon descended