[CHAPTER I.]
JENNER’S EARLIER YEARS.
The competent biographer, it is said, must be an admirer of his subject, for only so far as he sympathises can he understand. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner. But I neither propose to write a Life of Jenner, nor do I believe it essential to insight to sympathise where compelled to reprobate. In Jenner’s case we have to deal with an accident rather than with a vigorous personification of evil. It was his fate to have a happy (or unhappy) thought, adapted to the humour and practice of his time, which was immediately caught up and carried to world-wide issues. In himself, he was as ordinary a character as was ever thrust into greatness. For the mischief of his thought, some of his contemporaries were as responsible as himself—some, indeed, more blameworthy. With Bishop Butler I may ask, “Why may not whole communities be seized with fits of insanity, as well as individuals?” and with him aver, “Nothing else can account for a great part of what we read in history.” The common mind passes at times into unwholesome conditions, wherein the words of Paul are exemplified, “For this cause shall God send them a strong delusion, that they should believe a lie.”
Edward Jenner, the son of a clergyman, was born at Berkeley, Gloucestershire, on 17th May, 1749. After the usual education of a youth of his class, he was apprenticed to Mr. Ludlow, surgeon and apothecary, of Sodbury, near Bristol; and on the completion of his time (1770) was sent to London, where he resided for two years with Dr. John Hunter, who increased his means for scientific inquiry by the reception of pupils, caring much more for his menagerie at Brompton than for patients, and utilising his pupils as assistants in his researches. Captain Cook returned from his first voyage of discovery in 1771, and his collection of specimens of natural history was assigned to Hunter for arrangement, who set Jenner to work upon them; and, it is said, he did his duty so well that he was offered the appointment of naturalist in Cook’s next expedition. Jenner was, however, eager to commence business as country surgeon, and in 1772, at the age of 23, he returned to his native vale, legally qualified by his experience at Sodbury, and his two years with Hunter, to practise at discretion on the good folk of Berkeley.
It may be said that Jenner’s was a poor sort of training for a medical man, but it is to be questioned if he lost much by his ignorance; for a century ago medical knowledge was largely absurdity, and practice mischief; and he did best who stood most frequently helpless in the presence of Nature. Sir Benjamin Brodie relates how he served when a young man with a general practitioner near Leicester Square—
His treatment of disease seemed to be very simple. He had in his shop five large bottles, which were labelled Mistura Salina, Mistura Cathartica, Mistura Astringens, Mistura Cinchonæ, and another, of which I forget the name, but it was some kind of white emulsion for coughs; and it seemed to me that out of these five bottles he prescribed for two-thirds of his patients. I do not, however, set this down to his discredit; for I have observed that while young members of the medical profession generally deal in a great variety of remedies, they commonly discard the greater number of them as they grow older, until at last their treatment of diseases becomes almost as simple as that of my Æsculapius of Little Newport Street.[85]
Hunter’s name is often used as a sort of consecration of Jenner, but for no obvious reason. Hunter confirmed, if he did not beget in Jenner a strong liking for natural history; and when Jenner was settled in the country, he often availed himself of his services as observer and collector, writing to him for information about the habits of the cuckoo, the breeding of toads and frogs, and the sexes of eels; for cuckoos’ stomachs, crows and magpies’ nests, for bats, hedgehogs, blackbirds, lizards, hares, and fossils; for a cock salmon, for salmon spawn and fry, for a large porpoise, “for love or money;” for the arm of a certain patient when he dies; suggesting horrible experiments on hedgehogs, bats, and dogs, and describing one of special atrocity upon an ass. The most serious proposition in their correspondence was that Jenner should come to London as a teacher of natural history, but Hunter threw out the suggestion with hesitation, the qualification for the appointment being 1000 guineas down. Jenner had improved, or supposed he had improved, the preparation of tartar emetic, and Hunter wrote—
Dear Jenner,—I am puffing off your tartar as the tartar of all tartars, and have given it to several physicians to make a trial of, but as yet have had no account of their success. Had you not better let a bookseller have it to sell, as Glass of Oxford did his magnesia? Let it be called Jenner’s Tartar Emetic, or anybody’s else you please.
Hunter died in 1793, and there is no evidence that Jenner submitted to his judgment the question of Vaccination, if even we allow that prior to that date the project had occurred to Jenner himself. It is certain that he mentioned to Hunter that country folk believed that to catch cowpox was to be secure from smallpox, and that Hunter repeated the fact in his conversation and lectures; but there is no reference to the matter in Hunter’s writing and correspondence.
It is the habit of Jenner’s admirers to represent him as a patient investigator to whom a great thought dawned in boyhood, which was brought forth in the maturity of life. In conformity with this legend, it is related that when an apprentice at Sodbury, a young woman came to his master’s surgery, and smallpox being mentioned, she said, “I cannot take that disease, for I have had cowpox;” and her observation was pondered in his heart; whereon Dr. Baron, his biographer, ecstatically launches forth—
Newton had unfolded his doctrine of light and colours before he was twenty: Bacon wrote his Temporis Partus Maximus before he attained that age: Montesquieu had sketched his Spirit of Laws at an equally early period of life: and Jenner, when he was still younger, contemplated the possibility of removing from among the list of human diseases one of the most mortal that ever scourged our race. The hope of doing this great good never deserted him, though he met with many discouragements; his notions having been treated with scorn and ridicule by some, and with indifference by almost all.