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Cowpox virus (source: Britannica.com)
The word vaccination was created in 1803 by Royal Jenner Society. It derives from latin vaccina (eng. cowpox) — latin vacca means cow. What has vaccination got in common with cows?
The story has the beginning in incredible beauty of lady Mary Wortley Montagu marred by pox scars. As a spin-off, an inoculation process was becoming more and more popular. Inoculation in basis was the process of infecting healthy human by secretion from pox blisters. This was both painful and not fully effective (20% inoculated people died of pox triggered of by this process). A few years later, Edward Jenner observed that people who experienced cowpox, a calm and nonfatal form of pox, gained immunity for human pox (and many other form of poxes, as the are all triggered off by similar viruses, but Jenner couldn’t know that, as it turned out some decades later). So Edward Jenner, pestered by the opinion of other antiquated and hardly reformable doctors, has sacrificed his life to lobby the fact, that highly fatal human pox can be destroyed completely by his vaccination. Due to many circumstances, despite of the fact that he was vaccinating poor people for free, he did not succeed completely. However, his life mission was accomplished nearly 200 year later — the human pox has disappeared from Earth completely.
