PART 2: Laying the foundation for the development of modern vaccines by looking back to the origins
When I was a postgraduate student taking microbiology classes, I recall reading about Edward Jenner for the first time. Jenner, born in 1749, was an English physician and scientist who has been credited for pioneering the concept of vaccination. He created the smallpox vaccine; the world's first widely distributed vaccine.
Edward Jenner would eventually become one of the most famous scientists in medical history and was fondly named the ?Father of Immunology.?
But did you know that an ancient practice called ?inoculation? had been used in traditional Asian and African medicine for centuries before this?
Inoculation was the act of deliberately exposing healthy people to the body fluids of an infected person in order to trigger sufficient protective immunity and ward off future disease.
Well, I?m stretching it a little here. In those days they really didn?t know anything about the immune system let alone how it worked. But through repeated practice, they figured out that it worked. It was powerful magic. It really was.
The earliest written evidence of ?inoculation? can be traced to China, as documented in a book first published in 1549. It is thought that the method had been developed around 1000 AD, and was practiced by Taoists and Buddhist monks as a mixture of medicine, technique, magic, and spells. The technique was a taboo shrouded in secrecy. It was transmitted orally and was not written.
In another Asian setting, ancient Sanskrit texts claim that ?inoculation? had been practiced in India as well for thousands of years in Bengal; the region that includes modern West Bengal in India and Bangladesh. The Bengali technique involved dipping a sharp iron needle into a smallpox pustule and then puncturing the skin repeatedly in a small circle, usually on the upper arm.
In the 17th century inoculation came to be established in the Ottoman Empire and had reached Constantinople by about 1650.
Inoculation soon spread to the Arabs in North Africa who are on record for using it well before 1700. The practice somehow spread south and became established among West Africans.
The first encounter of western medicine with inoculation came around 1716. An enslaved West African man named Onesimus told his slave master, a prominent Puritan minister called Reverend Cotton Mather, about a traditional West African practice for managing smallpox outbreaks. It involved rubbing pus from an infected individual?s pustules into an open wound slit on the arm of a non-infected person.
The traditional healers knew how much inoculum to administer to protect the recipient. The non-infected person suffered a mild reaction, but upon recovery, became protected from future infection.
Mather was fascinated and took it upon himself to verify Onesimus? story with that of other enslaved Africans.
Mather spread the word throughout Massachusetts and elsewhere in the hopes that it would help prevent smallpox. He was greatly disappointed when instead he was vilified and ridiculed. How dare he suggest that the slaves had developed a method to contain smallpox?
On April 22, 1721, a British ship arrived in Boston Harbor. On board, one of the sailors had begun to exhibit symptoms of smallpox. Smallpox had made its way into the Boston area in Massachusetts 28 years before Edward Jenner was born. The outbreak spread through the city.
A Boston physician called Zabdiel Boylston decided to put this method to test by inoculating his son, his slaves and other willing Bostonians. He had been intrigued by Onesimus? idea. Of the 242 people he inoculated, only six died. That was one in 40, as opposed to one in seven among the people who didn?t undergo the procedure.
The smallpox epidemic eventually killed 844 people (over 14% of the population in Boston at the time) but it had yielded hope for future epidemics. It also helped set the stage for vaccination.
Variolation (referred to then as ?inoculation?) was introduced to Britain and New England in the 18th century. It was administered as a preventive measure to people likely to be at risk of infection with smallpox.
Zabdiel Boylston went on to publish an article entitled ?An Historical Account of the Smallpox Inoculated in New England?.
Well, I don?t want to rain on Edward Jenner?s parade. Let me give credit where it is due.
Years later in 1796, Edward Jenner developed an effective vaccine that used cowpox to provoke smallpox immunity. By so doing, he played an important role in standardizing vaccination as a practice and opening it up to widespread modern use.
Following Jenner?s work, vaccines went through several generations of development.
By 1980, the World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated from the world. A great scientific achievement! Smallpox remains the only infectious disease to have been wiped out through vaccination efforts.
Other diseases like polio and measles had been eliminated in many regions and suppressed in Africa and Asia; the only remaining hotspots (apart from recent measles outbreaks in the USA).
This brings us to the end of the second part of this 4-part series. In case you missed the first part, find it here.
PART 2: Origins of Vaccination
PART 3: Generations of Vaccines
You may take a break here, but look out the third part where I'll delve into the evolution of vaccine development technologies that opened up opportunities for the development of the very first mRNA Vaccines.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Discover how a Technical Life Science Copywriter can help you communicate innovations effectively for greater public acceptance. Also, get to know blind spots in your website that affect how your content performs. Schedule your FREE diagnostic site content review to find out.