It’s Time For Edward Jenner To Be Recognized — Again
You may not be immediately familiar with the name Edward Jenner. Prince Albert unveiled a statue of Jenner in London’s Trafalgar Square in 1858, only for protestors to force it to be moved to a far less prominent position inside Kensington Gardens in 1862 — where it remains.
Protests over statues have become familiar in the past year. The death of George Floyd in the US triggered a wave of indignation that many cities — including inside the UK — were still honouring figures associated with the slave trade. A statue of Edward Colston met a watery end last year when protestors in Bristol decided that it was about time to not have a key figure of the Atlantic slave trade honoured in their city.
But Jenner was the first doctor to ever create a vaccine. In 1796 Jenner demonstrated that deliberately infecting a patient with the relatively mild Cowpox virus would offer protection against the far more serious Smallpox. Smallpox was extremely dangerous — patients who survived were often blinded for life, and not many survived.
Jenner proved his methods through experiments that could be repeated, but there was serious opposition to vaccination. Many medical professionals were making a nice living offering variolation services, which was a crude form of vaccination — the treatment itself carried a 0.5–2% risk of death. Many people were also offended by the idea that a disease from an animal might protect a human from a different disease. Cartoons of the day suggested that Jenner might be creating hybrid humans.
A combination of the anti-vaccination movement and the British military — who felt that Trafalgar Square was only appropriate for military heroes — ensured that Jenner’s statue was removed. He wasn’t removed for being a slave trader, he saved lives by creating a reliable and repeatable method to vaccinate people against Smallpox.
If the anti-vaxxers had 5G communications back in 1862 then they probably would have suggested that Jenner was injecting them with 5G transmitters so that Queen Victoria could keep an eye on them. It’s a wearily familiar story and yet as vaccine development progressed and improved, and pioneers such as Louis Pasteur discovered how to create vaccines for other diseases, vaccination became accepted and understood.
Over the years, Jenner’s innovation must have saved countless lives. Even during his lifetime it was common for Smallpox to kill a third of all patients. In the two centuries since he demonstrated his first vaccine it is unimaginable to consider how many people lived, and suffered less, because of his work.
Today we can see the importance of vaccines more than ever. There have now been over 100 million reported cases of Covid-19 and 2.3 million deaths. When this pandemic began, the scientists warned that a virus we have never seen before was going to be dangerous, even if it only kills a small percentage of victims. They were right.
It’s the vaccines that have been developed in record time that will allow the world to return to some form of normality. Everyone in every nation should really know the story of Edward Jenner and yet he remains hidden in a quiet corner of a park, rather than enjoying the prominence of Churchill, Nelson, and battles such as Trafalgar.
Leaders of war are remembered and honoured. Leaders in medicine quietly pass their time in London parks.
