When Words Fail
By: Bill Foege
Someday this may even be known to historians as the vaccine age. It started 215 years ago when Edward Jenner gave the first vaccination to James Phipps, using material from the cowpox lesion on the hand of Sarah Nelms. Jenner had no knowledge of viruses, vaccines or vaccinology but he was attempting to duplicate what he had observed in nature, namely that milkmaids were protected from smallpox, evidently because they had experienced cowpox lesions on their hands from milking cows.
This was also the beginning of modern public health because now there was a tool that could be used to prevent disease. While the first vaccine goes back two centuries, the field has exploded in my lifetime. My mother bought a baby book when I was born more than 75 years ago and it mentions only two vaccines. But now we use 18 routinely and another dozen for certain age groups or certain geographic areas of the world.
