The aim he had in view was too great for ridicule to daunt, or indifference to discourage him. When he surveyed the mental and physical agony inflicted by the disease, and the thought occurred to him that he was on the point of finding a sure and certain remedy, his benevolent heart overflowed with unselfish gladness.
No feeling of personal ambition, no hope or desire of fame, sullied the purity of his noble philanthropy. 'While the vaccine discovery was progressive,' he writes, 'the joy at the prospect before me of being the instrument destined to take away from the world one of its greatest calamities, blended with the fond hope of enjoying independence, and domestic peace and happiness, were often so excessive, that, in pursuing my favorite subject among the meadows, I have sometimes found myself in a kind of reverie.
It is pleasant to recollect that those reflections always ended in devout acknowledgments to that Being from whom this and all other blessings flow.' At last an opportunity occurred of putting his theory to the test. On the 14th day of May, 1796,--the day marks an epoch in the Healing Art, and is not less worthy of being kept as a national thanksgiving than the day of Waterloo--the cow-pox matter or pus was taken from the hand of one Sarah Holmes, who had been infected from her master's cows, and was inserted by two superficial incisions into the arms of James Phipps, a healthy boy of about eight years of age. The cow-pox ran its ordinary course without any injurious effect, and the boy was afterward inoculated for the small-pox,--happily in vain. The protection was complete; and Jenner thenceforward pursued his experiments with redoubled ardor. His first summary of them, after having been examined and approved by several friends, appeared under the title of 'An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae,' in June, 1798. In this important work he announced the security against the small-pox afforded by the true cow-pox, and proceeded to trace the origin of that disease in the cow to a similar affection of the horse's heel."This publication produced a great sensation in the medical world, and vaccination spread so rapidly that in the following summer Jenner had the indorsement of the majority of the leading surgeons of London. Vaccination was soon introduced into France, where Napoleon gave another proof of his far-reaching sagacity by his immediate recognition of the importance of vaccination. It was then spread all over the continent; and in 1800 Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse of Boston introduced it into America; in 1801, with his sons-in-law, President Jefferson vaccinated in their own families and those of their friends nearly 200 persons. Quinan has shown that vaccination was introduced into Maryland at least simultaneously with its introduction into Massachusetts. De Curco introduced vaccination into Vienna, where its beneficial results were displayed on a striking scale; previously the average annual mortality had been about 835; the number now fell to 164 in 1801, 61 in 1802, and 27 in 1803. After the introduction of vaccination in England the mortality was reduced from nearly 3000 per million inhabitants annually to 310 per million annually. During the small-pox epidemic in London in 1863, Seaton and Buchanan examined over 50,000 school children, and among every thousand without evidences of vaccination they found 360 with the scars of small-pox, while of every thousand presenting some evidence of vaccination, only 1.78 had any such traces of small-pox to exhibit. Where vaccination has been rendered compulsory, the results are surprising. In 1874 a law was established in Prussia that every child that had not already had small-pox must be vaccinated in the first year of its life, and every pupil in a private or public institution must be revaccinated during the year in which his or her twelfth birthday occurs. This law virtually stamped small-pox out of existence; and according to Frolich not a single death from small-pox occurred in the German army between 1874 and 1882. Notwithstanding the arguments advanced in this latter day against vaccination, the remembrance of a few important statistic facts is all that is necessary to fully appreciate the blessing which Jenner conferred upon humanity. In the last century, besides the enormous mortality of small-pox (it was computed that, in the middle of the last century, 2,000,000 victims perished in Russia from small-pox), the marks of affliction, blindness, deafness, etc., were plain in at least one member of every family.