The history of vaccination
The bells are tolling today for more and more people to come and get vaccinated against the Covid-19 pandemic. But what is a vaccine?, Where does it come from? , Who came up with the concept of vaccination?. I am going to attempt to put aside all the medical facts and give you a short history of how the vaccine as we know it today came into existence.
If we were to talk about the origins of the concept of vaccination, we need not look to the west but to the east, in the 10 century AD, the world was being rocked by the smallpox epidemic, now trust when I tell you that if you are to look up, on images of smallpox , it is the stuff of nightmares, your body covered in these blisters and pores with puss oozing out of it, and if you were somehow miraculously cured of, it would leave behind a reminder of itself with your body and face covered with scars, which made you feel empathetic for those who were infected.
But in the 10 century the Chinese had come up with a rudimentary form of vaccination know today as variolation or sometimes inoculation, they would gather the puss oozing out of the pores of an individual infected with smallpox and then dry it in the sun, after this was done the virus would have lost some of its potency, a physician would then use a long rod and insert one end of the rod into the nose of the person who was to be variolated and put the dried matter into the nasal passage and introduce the virus into the body of a healthy individual. The artificially infected person would then showcase the symptoms of a person infected with smallpox, but once these symptoms subsided and the individual normalized, the doctor would expose the individual to a person freshly infected with smallpox, and surprisingly he or she would be immune.
So the idea of a vaccine is to introduce the disease-causing pathogen in a mild form into the body of a person who is not infected, then allow the body to develop a certain degree of resistance against the pathogen and then the next time the body is met with a similar form of the previously introduced foreign disease it identifies and annihilates the contaminant.
So while all of this was happening in China, Europe would be still affected by the disease, but there was some hope in certain parts, people were carrying out inoculation in certain isolated cases.
It wouldn’t be until the 1700’s that an English physician by the name of Edward Jenner would look into the matter seriously. Jenner himself had been inoculated when he was younger and wanted to do something to eradicate the infernal disease.
That was when something caught his attention, the milkmaids of the country were not getting infected by the disease, but they did get infected with another cousin of smallpox know as cowpox.
This fascinated Jenner, as the milkmaids were considered beautiful as they did not have the scare-marked faces of the populous and were much sought after. So he had an idea, he would deliberately infect a healthy person with cowpox, for this he chose his gardener’s son, who was called James Phipps, Jenner took the puss out of the pores of a milkmaid who had been freshly infected with cowpox.
He brought back the sample and gently made a few cuts on the boy’s arm and introduced the pathogen. The boy exhibited in the first couple of days the symptoms associated with smallpox, then he was fine. So then Jenner brings the boy in contact with a person who had been freshly infected with smallpox, and here again to Jenner’s delight, the boy was A-okay and very well. Just a side note if you are wondering how we get the English word Vaccine, it happens to be from the Latin word “Vacca”, which means cow.
This was the first successful case of vaccinating an individual, then through the years to come it was much debated over, and finally, in the year 1979–80, the WHO declared smallpox as completely eradicated.
The next major innovation in the world of vaccines was to come in the year 1885 when Louis Pasteur came up with the rabies vaccine.
Further innovations continued in this field and even to this day, we are seeing the impact of a liquid in a syringe due to this truly global struggle against the pandemic.
This pandemic is really testing all of us and that includes modern science, I believe it shows us that it is in tough times like these we must all as a human family pull in all our resources and help each other
So let’s not forget the scientists and doctors who have laboured hard to create these wonders of modern medicine and let’s thank them and hope that they continue to innovate and inspire.
