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That CAN'T be true! / Re: Did you know that Small Pox Innoculation WAS NOT discovered by the British?
« on: 08/01/2012 11:03:41 »
Edward Jenner did not discover inoculation but vaccination of smallpox. Whereas inoculation prevented most of getting a violent clinical status of the disease and decreased the death rate, vaccination permitted a 100% protection against smallpox and its eradication in the early 1980’s.
Inoculation is taking the virus from a sick person and transmitting it to a healthy person in small quantities hopping to develop this person’s defense mechanism but with the risk of infecting him.
Vaccination has different ways of working: in the case of smallpox it was using a similar virus (cowpox) which is very benign against humans (only a few pustules on the site of contamination/injection) but triggers the same defense mechanism. Other vaccines use a ‘’killed’’ or ‘’downgraded’’ version of the infectious virus.
Jenner who lived on the English southern coast had a tendency to sleep with a lot of different women whether local peasant girls or city summer tourists. His genius was to observe that the city girls more often had and ugly smallpox distorted skin covering large areas of their bodies whereas peasant girls did not. Not only that, but the peasant girls had scars only in certain spots of their bodies: their hands. He deduced from this that these scars came from a virus (although he did not know about viruses in those days but supposed there was some kind of infectious agent) similar to smallpox but not deadly at all : cowpox. Which the peasant girls would get by milking cows with their hands. But which would also prevent them from getting smallpox. Thus by experimenting on a child, Jenner took pus from a infected cow and directly injected to the child (after payment to the father), and then injected smallpox which did not provoke a disease. Although Jenner was ridiculed by the royal academy, his discovery eventually made its way through the late 19th century and early 20th century finally being accepted and widely used. There was one danger with the early technique: in those days there was no way to prove that the pus on the cow or horse used was from smallpox and not another disease (for example tuberculosis quite common in cows). Later the use of another virus and better technique prevented this. This virus being the named the virus of the Vaccine. The word of vaccination comes from the latin vacca meaning the cow, in honor of Jenner’s discovery.
By the 1790’s inoculation was a common practice in Europe as getting smallpox was considered a fatal truth no one could avoid. Thus it was better to be inoculated by a small quantity of virus when you were young and strong to trigger your immune system (or your body defence mechanism) than to get an infectious dose later. Inoculation had actually been discovered in China nearly 800 years before (with a rate of failure sometimes as deadly as a natural infection itself)
The Americans only used this basic European knowledge to their use when smallpox finally broke out in America in the 1770’s
What the physician did at Valley Forge was nothing more than quick thinking and a rather efficient practical use of that knowledge. This event is no scientific breaktrough. The only "incredible" aspects of this mass inoculation is : 1) to have saved the continental army and 2) to have produced a "experimental ground" where you could easily count dead and survivors from the inoculation and thus evaluate the efficacy of the inoculation techniques of that era. And 1 out of 50 is an ok result but nothing great, if nowadays every vaccination killed 2% of the population then a lot of people wouldn’t reach the age of 20.
One big difference in this last aspect is that if you get smallpox from after inoculation, than it’s the inoculation that killed you, if it’s after a vaccination than it’s that the vaccination is to recent to effectively protect you or that someone put water in your shot.
So no, Inoculation was not discovered by the British (nor was it discovered by the Americans) but vaccination sure was. And just in case, I am not British but American and not of British descent, but fact stays fact.
Inoculation is taking the virus from a sick person and transmitting it to a healthy person in small quantities hopping to develop this person’s defense mechanism but with the risk of infecting him.
Vaccination has different ways of working: in the case of smallpox it was using a similar virus (cowpox) which is very benign against humans (only a few pustules on the site of contamination/injection) but triggers the same defense mechanism. Other vaccines use a ‘’killed’’ or ‘’downgraded’’ version of the infectious virus.
Jenner who lived on the English southern coast had a tendency to sleep with a lot of different women whether local peasant girls or city summer tourists. His genius was to observe that the city girls more often had and ugly smallpox distorted skin covering large areas of their bodies whereas peasant girls did not. Not only that, but the peasant girls had scars only in certain spots of their bodies: their hands. He deduced from this that these scars came from a virus (although he did not know about viruses in those days but supposed there was some kind of infectious agent) similar to smallpox but not deadly at all : cowpox. Which the peasant girls would get by milking cows with their hands. But which would also prevent them from getting smallpox. Thus by experimenting on a child, Jenner took pus from a infected cow and directly injected to the child (after payment to the father), and then injected smallpox which did not provoke a disease. Although Jenner was ridiculed by the royal academy, his discovery eventually made its way through the late 19th century and early 20th century finally being accepted and widely used. There was one danger with the early technique: in those days there was no way to prove that the pus on the cow or horse used was from smallpox and not another disease (for example tuberculosis quite common in cows). Later the use of another virus and better technique prevented this. This virus being the named the virus of the Vaccine. The word of vaccination comes from the latin vacca meaning the cow, in honor of Jenner’s discovery.
By the 1790’s inoculation was a common practice in Europe as getting smallpox was considered a fatal truth no one could avoid. Thus it was better to be inoculated by a small quantity of virus when you were young and strong to trigger your immune system (or your body defence mechanism) than to get an infectious dose later. Inoculation had actually been discovered in China nearly 800 years before (with a rate of failure sometimes as deadly as a natural infection itself)
The Americans only used this basic European knowledge to their use when smallpox finally broke out in America in the 1770’s
What the physician did at Valley Forge was nothing more than quick thinking and a rather efficient practical use of that knowledge. This event is no scientific breaktrough. The only "incredible" aspects of this mass inoculation is : 1) to have saved the continental army and 2) to have produced a "experimental ground" where you could easily count dead and survivors from the inoculation and thus evaluate the efficacy of the inoculation techniques of that era. And 1 out of 50 is an ok result but nothing great, if nowadays every vaccination killed 2% of the population then a lot of people wouldn’t reach the age of 20.
One big difference in this last aspect is that if you get smallpox from after inoculation, than it’s the inoculation that killed you, if it’s after a vaccination than it’s that the vaccination is to recent to effectively protect you or that someone put water in your shot.
So no, Inoculation was not discovered by the British (nor was it discovered by the Americans) but vaccination sure was. And just in case, I am not British but American and not of British descent, but fact stays fact.