The frequent statement that Jenner’s Inquiry was at first received with indifference is entirely untrue: on the contrary, it was read with interest from the outset, and the only check he met was due to his inability to supply the demands of correspondents for samples of the precious virus. Cowpox was absent for awhile from the dairies, and great was his relief and delight when toward the end of 1798 some matter was obtained from a farm at Stonehouse wherewith on the 27th November he vaccinated the children of his friend, Henry Hicks of Eastington; “the first gentleman,” says Baron, “who had the merit of submitting his own children to the new practice.”
Ere 1798 had passed away, Jenner had secured an energetic ally in Dr. George Pearson, F.R.S., Physician to St. George’s Hospital, London.[104] Pearson entered into the cowpox question with his whole heart, and constituted himself a sort of partner in Jenner’s project. He wrote to him—
Leicester Square, 8th November, 1798.
Your name will live in the memory of mankind, as long as men possess gratitude for services and respect for benefactors; and if I can but get matter, I am much mistaken if I do make you live for ever.
And in a more decided strain on 13th November—
I wish you could secure me matter for inoculation, because, depend upon it, a thousand inacurate but imposing cases will be published against the specific nature of the disease by persons who want to send their names abroad about anything, and who will think you and me fair game.
In the same letter he told Jenner what some were saying about the suggested practice—
You cannot imagine how fastidious the people are with regard to this business of the cowpox. One says that it is very filthy and nasty to derive it from the sore heels of horses. Another, that we shall introduce the diseases of animals among us, and that we have already too many of our own. A third sapient set say, it is a strange odd kind of business, and they know not what to think of it. All this I hear very quietly, and recollect that a still more unfavourable reception was given to inoculation for the smallpox.
Such observations were natural and to be expected. Jenner wrote to Gardner that “brick-bats and hostile weapons of every sort were flying thick around him,” but they were chiefly imaginary. His revelation was communicated to a ready world. It was no revolutionary project, but a seductive modification of existing practice. Inoculation with smallpox was the order of the day among all respectable people. The operation was troublesome and uncertain, perilous to patients and to those in contact with them; and, when all was done, it afforded no unquestionable security against the disease it was designed to avert. To a community thus harassed and anxious, came Jenner with his prescription and his promise—Substitute cowpox for smallpox and you will escape from this distress, danger, doubt. You will have a harmless fever without pustules and without risk of infection, and the security from smallpox will be absolute and perpetual. What wonder that in such circumstances Jenner’s message was heard gladly and accepted with grateful enthusiasm. That he should have encountered some resistance was inevitable, for what change is ever effected without opposition and ominous prediction? But the change Jenner proposed was the slightest of changes with the largest prospects of advantage. Unless these conditions are borne in mind, we shall never rightly understand the reception accorded by our forefathers to inoculation with cowpox.