JENNER’S
Publications on Vaccination and Successive Assurances.
An Inquiry into the Cause and Effects of the Variolæ Vaccinæ, a Disease discovered in some of the Western Counties of England, particularly Gloucestershire, and known by the name of the Cow Pox. London: 1798.
1798.—What renders the Cow Pox Virus so extremely singular is, that the person who has been thus affected is for ever after secure from the infection of the Small Pox; neither the exposure to the variolous effluvia, nor the insertion of the matter into the skin, producing this distemper.
It is curious to observe, that the virus, which with respect to its effects is undetermined and uncertain previously to its passing from the horse through the medium of the cow, should then not only become more active, but should invariably and completely possess those specific properties which induce in the human constitution symptoms similar to those of the variolous fever, and effect in it that peculiar change which for ever renders it unsusceptible of the variolous contagion.
It clearly appears that this disease leaves the constitution in a state of perfect security from the infection of the Small Pox.—Pp. [121], [337].
Further Observations on the Variolæ Vaccinæ. London: 1799.
1799.—The result of all my trials with the virus on the human subject has been uniform. In every instance the patient who has felt its influence has completely lost the susceptibility for the variolous contagion.—Pp. [152-158], [336].
A Continuation of Facts and Observations relative to the Variolæ Vaccinæ, or Cow Pox. London: 1800.
1800.—The scepticism that appeared even among the most enlightened of medical men, when my sentiments on the important subject of the Cow Pox were first promulgated, was highly laudable. To have admitted the truth of a doctrine, at once so novel and so unlike anything that had ever appeared in the Annals of Medicine, without the test of the most rigid scrutiny, would have bordered upon temerity; but now, when that scrutiny has taken place, not only among ourselves, but in the first professional circles in Europe, and when it has been uniformly found in such abundant instances, that the human frame, when once it has felt the influence of the genuine Cow Pox in the way that has been described, is never afterwards, at any period of its existence, assailable by the Small Pox, may I not with perfect confidence congratulate my country and society at large on their beholding in the mild form of the Cow Pox, an antidote that is capable of extirpating from the earth a disease which is every hour devouring its victims; a disease that has ever been considered as the severest scourge of the human race.—Pp. [166], [338-339], [357], [365], [473].