Edward Jenner humans a cowpox vaccine against smallpox. For example, Dorset farmer Benjamin Jesty successfully vaccinated and presumably induced immunity with cowpox in his wife and two children during a smallpox epidemic in 1774, but it was not until Jenner's work that the procedure became widely understood. Jenner may have been aware of Jesty's procedures and success. A similar observation had also been made in France by Jacques Antoine Rabaut-Pommier in 1780. Noting the common observation that milkmaids were generally immune to smallpox, Jenner postulated that the pus in the blisters that milkmaids received from cowpox (a disease similar to smallpox, but
Sir William Jenner, 1st Baronet Sir William Jenner, 1st Baronet Sir William Jenner, 1st Baronet, GCB, QHP, FRCP, FRS (30 January 1815 – 11 December 1898) was a significant English physician primarily known for having discovered the distinction between typhus and typhoid. Jenner was born at Chatham on 30 January 1815, and educated at University College London. He became a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England (M.R.C.S.) in 1837, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (F.R.C.P.) in 1852, and in 1844 took the London M.D. In 1847 he began at the London Fever Hospital investigations into cases of continued fever