The effects of incessant labours were beginning seriously to tell on Jenner’s health, when in 1810 he lost his eldest son from consumption, in his 21st year. This event preyed much on his mind, and left him in a state occasioning great anxiety to his friends. In the same year he lost his firm friend the Earl of Berkeley, and his beloved sister, Mrs. Black. Under these troubles he felt the more acutely the calumnious attacks to which he was constantly subjected. Dr. Parry of Bath, writing to him about this time, says—“For Heaven’s sake, think no more of these wasps, who hum and buzz about you, and whom your indifference and silence will freeze into utter oblivion. Let me again entreat you not to give them one moment’s consideration, opus exegisti ære perennius. The great business is accomplished, and the blessing is ready for those who choose to avail themselves of it; and with regard to those who reject it, the evil will be on their own heads.”

In 1811 occurred the first well-authenticated case of smallpox in a boy vaccinated by Jenner, the Hon. Robert Grosvenor. The disease became severe and threatened death, when all at once the later stages were passed through rapidly, and a good recovery was made. Other vaccinated children in this family were exposed to the contagion, and did not suffer. There seemed every reason, as Jenner explained, to ascribe the failure of protection in the first case to a peculiarity of constitution which would probably have exposed the patient to a second attack of smallpox. In fact, Dr. Jenner had vaccinated the child when in weak health at a month old. Lady Grosvenor was timid, and prevailed on him, contrary to his usual practice, to make one puncture only; and the pustule that resulted was deranged in its progress by being rubbed by the nurse. Nevertheless the case created much alarm and excitement, and greatly exhilarated the anti-vaccinists. Jenner’s simple answer was to admit the fact, alleging that if ten, fifty, or a hundred such events should occur, they would be balanced a hundred times over by cases of second attacks of smallpox. “I have ever considered the variolous and the vaccine radically and essentially the same. As the inoculation of the former has been known to fail in instances so numerous, it would be very extraordinary if the latter should always be exempt from failure. It would tend to invalidate my early doctrine on this point.”

A letter of Jenner to Dr. Baron on this subject, exhibits perhaps the utmost degree of irritation that he showed. “The Town is a fool—an idiot,” he remarks, “and will continue in this red-hot, hissing-hot state about this affair, till something else starts up to draw aside its attention. I am determined to lock up my brains and think no more pro bono publico.... It is my intention to collect all the cases I can of smallpox, after supposed security from that disease.”

In 1813 the degree of M.D. was voted to Jenner by the University of Oxford. It was expected that the London College of Physicians would have followed suit by admitting him to membership, but they exacted a full examination, which Jenner at his age, and with his reputation, could not be expected to submit to. In the summer of 1814 Jenner visited London for the last time, being presented to the Czar, and having numerous interviews with his sister, the Grand Duchess of Oldenburg. On the 13th September, 1815, Mrs. Jenner died, a calamity which most deeply afflicted Dr. Jenner, and seemed to mark his retirement from active public life. It is much to be regretted that he did not live to complete and publish his own final account, and matured convictions, as to the suitable conditions of vaccination, and the modifications and imperfections to which it was liable. This engaged much of his attention in his later years, but his inquiries were interrupted by illness and by family affliction. His later years were made painful by extreme nervous sensitiveness, and he had several attacks which foreboded death by apoplexy, which ultimately occurred on 26th January, 1823. He was buried at Berkeley, by the side of his wife, on 3d February.

Jenner’s nature, says his biographer, was mild, unobtrusive, unambitious; the singleness of his heart and his genuine modesty graced and adorned his splendid reputation. Had those who opposed him known how little of selfishness, vanity, or pride entered into his composition! He made no answer to aspersions.

“All the friends who watched him longest, and have seen most of his mind and of his conduct, with one voice declare that there was a something about him which they never witnessed in any other man. The first things that a stranger would remark were the gentleness, the simplicity, the artlessness of his manner. There was a total absence of all ostentation or display; so much so, that in the ordinary intercourse of society he appeared as a person who had no claims to notice. He was perfectly unreserved, and free from all guile. He carried his heart and his mind so openly, so undisguisedly, that all might read them. You could not converse with him, you could not enter his house nor his study, without seeing what sort of man dwelt there.”

“The objects of his studies generally lay scattered around him; and, as he used often to say himself, seemingly in chaotic confusion. Fossils, and other specimens of natural history, anatomical preparations, books, papers, letters—all presented themselves in strange disorder; but every article bore the impress of the genius that presided there. The fossils were marked by small pieces of paper pasted on them, having their names and the places where they were found inscribed in his own plain and distinct hand-writing.... He seemed to have no secrets of any kind: and, notwithstanding a long experience with the world, he acted to the last as if all mankind were trustworthy, and free from selfishness as himself. He had a working head, being never idle, and accumulated a great store of original observations. These treasures he imparted most generously and liberally. Indeed, his chief pleasure seemed to be in pouring out the ample riches of his mind to every one who enjoyed his acquaintance. He had often reason to lament this unbounded confidence; but such ungrateful returns neither chilled his ardour nor ruffled his temper.”

Such was the man to whom the world was indebted for vaccination; no court or metropolitan physician, no university student, but a country doctor, a man of science and of benevolence, whose name is undying.

[CHAPTER VII.]
SIR ASTLEY COOPER AND ABERNETHY: THE KNIFE VERSUS REGIMEN.

Few men have been more renowned in their day than the great “Sir Astley.”