I said the smallpox has gone out of late,
Perhaps it may be followed by the great.
(Stanza 130.)
Before 1812, Jenner had been made an honorary member of nearly every scientific society in Europe, and had received the freedom of the cities of London, Edinburgh, Dublin and Glasgow. The Medical Society of London presented him with a gold medal struck in his honor; in Berlin in 1812 there was a Jennerian festival on the anniversary of Phipps's vaccination. Addresses and diplomas were showered on him, and in 1813 the University of Oxford conferred on him the degree of M.D. honoris causa. As he refused point blank to pass the examination in Latin and Greek required by the Royal College of Physicians of London, Jenner never obtained admission into that learned body. When some one recommended him to revise his classics so that he might become an F.R.C.P. he replied, "I would not do it for a diadem"; and then, thinking of a far better reward, added: "I would not do it for John Hunter's museum."
But while the pure in heart were thus receiving the blessing offered them by the benovelent man of science, the pests of society, those discontented and jaundiced ones who are always to be found in the dark recesses of the cave of Adullam, were not idle. Many of his medical colleagues did indeed sneer, as some are always apt to do at any new thing however good. To all these Jenner replied, and a very great deal of his valuable time was consumed in arguing with them. But the sect of the anti-vaccinators had arisen, and was to some extent organized. Caricatures, lampoons, scurrilities, vulgarities and misrepresentations, the mean, were scattered on all sides. Nothing was too absurd to be stated or believed—that vaccinated persons had their faces grow like oxen, that they coughed like cows, bellowed like bulls and became hairy on the body. One omniscient objector declared that, "vaccination was the most degrading relapse of philosophy that had ever disgraced the civilized world." A Dr. Rowley, evidently imagining himself honored by a special participation in the Divine counsels, declared that "smallpox is a visitation from God, but cowpox is produced by presumptuous man. The former was what Heaven had ordained, the latter is a daring violation of our holy religion." It was rather hard to blame Dr. Jenner for the origin of cowpox. It took much forbearance to endure this sort of thing; but Jenner's was a first-class mind and he evidently dealt leniently even with fools. It was not for the first time in the world's history that a lover of mankind had been spurned with the words—"He hath a devil and is mad."
Besides enduring all these mental and physical worries, and the annoyance that the Royal Jennerian Society established in 1802 was so mismanaged that it collapsed in 1808, Jenner had spent a very large sum of private money on the introduction of vaccination. He had been, as he himself expressed it, "Vaccine clerk to the whole world." Parliament, it is true, in 1801, voted him a sum of 10,000 pounds which was not paid for three years afterwards and was diminished by 1,000 pounds deducted for fees, so that it barely recompensed him for his outlays. By 1806, the immensity of the benefit conferred upon his diseased fellow-creatures having been recognized more perfectly in every other country than his own, the British Parliament woke up, and voted him a sum of 20,000 pounds, only one member representing the anti-vaccinators opposing the grant. Parliament, which had previously received from the Colleges of Physicians of London, Edinburgh and Dublin the most favorable reports of the efficacy of vaccination, decided to reestablish the Royal Jennerian Institute. A subscription of 7,383 pounds from grateful India reached Jenner in 1812. In 1814 he was in London for the last time, when he was presented to the Emperor of Russia, Alexander I., who told him that he had very nearly subdued smallpox throughout that vast Empire. Jenner refused a Russian order on the ground that he was not a man of independent means.
The management of the Institute caused him much concern in his later years; he disapproved of the personnel and of many of the details of its working. One of the last worries of his life was an article in the November number for 1822 of the famous Edinburgh Review. Although it contained a good deal of praise, it was not favorable to Jenner, who said of it, "I put it down at 100,000 deaths at least." I have ascertained that this article was not written by the celebrated Francis Jeffrey, although he was editor of the Review until 1829.
Jenner's life, apart from his great discovery and his developing the practice of vaccination, has not much incident in it. He was born on May 17, 1749, the son of the Rev. Stephen Jenner, vicar of Berkeley, Gloucestershire, England, the same Berkeley in whose castle, Edward II., the vanquished at Banockburn, was murdered in 1327. Jenner's mother's name was Head. Edward went to school at Wotton-under-Edge and at Cirencester, and began to study medicine with a Mr. Ludlow, a surgeon at Sodbury near Bristol. In his twenty-first year, Jenner went to London as a pupil of the great John Hunter, in whose house, he lived two years, during which time he was entered as a medical student at St. George's Hospital. It is interesting to know that while still a student he was asked by Sir Joseph Banks to arrange and catalogue the zoological specimens brought home by the circumnavigator Captain Cook in his first voyage of 1771. Jenner devoted considerable attention to natural history, to geology and to the study of fossils, on which topics he kept up correspondence with Hunter long after he left London. In the year 1788 he married a Miss Kingscote, and settled down to practice in his native place. Mrs. Jenner died in 1815, after which date Jenner never left Berkeley again.
Curiously enough, it was not until 1792 that Jenner obtained the degree of M.D., and it was not from an English university at all, but from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. This university, the smallest although the oldest of the Scottish universities, has therefore the honor of being the Alma Mater to the epoch-making Englishman. I have seen the entry of the name in the list of graduates for the year 1792; it has evidently been misspelled, for the name is corrected. The first foreign university to recognize Jenner's eminence was Gottingen. In 1794 Jenner had an attack of typhus fever. Jenner never cared for London or a city life, and although in 1808 he was persuaded to take a house in town, he soon gave it up and went back to his beautiful Gloucestershire. For many years he practiced during the season in the pleasant health-resort of Cheltenham. He loved the country, he studied lovingly the living things around him there: many are familiar with a piece of verse he wrote on "The signs of rain."
The year 1810 was a sad one for Jenner: his eldest son died, and that noticeably depressed his health. In 1823 he presented a paper to the Royal Society on the migration of birds, a subject not even yet fully cleared up. On January 26, in the same year, he was stricken with paralysis on the right side and died within twenty-four hours. His body was buried in the chancel of the parish church of Berkeley, where there is a memorial window placed by public subscription. In person, Edward Jenner was short and rather heavily built; his expression of face was pleasant with a touch of sadness. All reports agree that in dress he was conspicuously neat, looking more like a gentleman-farmer than a physician, with his blue coat, yellow buttons, red waistcoat, buff breeches and top-boots.[5]
[5] He was painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence, by Northcote and by Vigneron.
There is no disguising the fact that during his lifetime Dr. Jenner was much more appreciated in foreign countries than in England. The medico-social club of Alverton, near where he lived, would not listen to him when he addressed them on vaccination. The effort to collect enough money from the medical men of England in order to place a marble statue to Jenner in the nave of Gloucester Cathedral, was successful only after a long delay. An attempt to erect a statue in London died of apathy; but in 1858, 32 years after he died, a statue was erected in Trafalgar Square. In 1862 it was removed to a quiet corner of Kensington gardens; and perhaps its surroundings, the trees, the flowers and the birds he loved are more suitable than the effigies of those national heroes who served their country by taking, not by saving life. No, Nelson the hero is hardly the suitable companion for Jenner the hero.