He had trained in London under one of the foremost surgeons of the day. Jenner’s interest in curing smallpox is thought to be influenced by his childhood experience of smallpox inoculation.
It’s said that Jenner was psychologically scarred by that experience, some of his motivation was just how horrific he'd found it,” says Owen Gower, manager of Dr Jenner’s House Museum. “He was thinking, ‘I want to find an alternative, something that's safer, that's less terrifying’.”
In 1796, after gathering some circumstantial evidence from farmers and milkmaids, Jenner decided to try an experiment. A potentially fatal experiment. On a child.
He took some pus from cowpox lesions on the hands of a young milkmaid, Sarah Nelms, and scratched it into the skin of eight-year old James Phipps. After a few days of mild illness, James recovered sufficiently for Jenner to inoculate the boy with matter from a smallpox blister. James did not develop smallpox, nor did any of the people he came into close contact with.
Although the experiment worked, by today’s standards it was ethically problematic.
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