Biomedical Engineering Reference
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the disease. (It could be risky because people who were inoculated
sometimes developed full-blown smallpox.) The wife of the British
consul in Constantinople (now Istanbul) reported this practice of
inoculation in her letters home and, soon, after some initial testing
on royal children and convicted felons, the practice became
widespread in England, France, Russia, and North America.
In 1798, Edward Jenner, an English country physician, reported
success in providing protection from smallpox by scratching the
skin with a pin that held scrapings from the skin of dairymaids
who had cowpox , a mild disease the women contracted by handling
the udders of infected cows. Farmers knew that dairymaids who
developed cowpox could not catch smallpox. Jenner did his first
experiment on a young boy, scratching the boy's skin with a pin
that held cowpox material from an infected dairymaid. Six weeks
later, Jenner repeated the process, scratching the boy with small-
pox, rather than cowpox, material on the pin. The child did not get
the small sore that the smallpox scratch usually caused, which sug-
gested that the boy was protected against smallpox. More studies
followed, and smallpox vaccination with cowpox became routine
(Figure 3.1).
VACCINATION: LESS RISKY AND MORE EFFECTIVE
The word vaccination comes from vaccinia , the name of the virus
now known to cause cowpox ( vaca is the Latin word for “cow”). The
term vaccination is now broadly used to describe the process of
causing a mild disease in order to protect a person from a more
dangerous disease. Vaccination is one form of immunization , expos-
ing the body to a material to stimulate a protective response from
the immune system . Vaccination is routinely used to prevent many
illnesses, including measles, mumps, German measles (rubella),
chicken pox, and polio. Many of these illnesses have disappeared or
become very rare in developed countries that provide widespread
vaccinations. Smallpox has been eradicated worldwide, thanks to
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