Popular Science Monthly - Oct, Nov, Dec, 1915 — Volume 86 by Anonymous
page 107 of 485 (22%)
page 107 of 485 (22%)
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we are now in a far better position to admit its probability
than were those of Jenner's time. We have since then learned that man shares many diseases with the lower animals, tuberculosis, plague, rabies, diphtheria and pleuro-pneumonia, to mention only a few. We have also learned that certain lower animals, insects for instance, are intermediary hosts in the life-cycle of many minute parasites which cause serious diseases in the human being, amongst which malaria, yellow fever and the sleeping sickness are the most familiar. It appears to have been understood before Jenner's time that persons who had acquired cowpox by handling cattle, but especially by milking cows, were immune from smallpox. In the reign of Charles II. it is well known that the court beauties envied the dairy-maids because having had cowpox, they could not take smallpox which all women so dreaded. Dr. Corlett tells us that the Duchess of Cleveland, one of the King's mistresses, on being told that she might lose her place in the royal favor if she were disfigured by smallpox, replied that she had nothing to fear as she had had cowpox. In 1769 a German, Bose, wrote on the subject of cowpox protecting from smallpox. In the year 1774 a cattle dealer, Benjamin Jesty, at Yetminster, in Dorset, inoculated his wife and three children with cowpox. None of them ever took smallpox during the rest of their lives although frequently exposed to its infection. Jesty died in 1816, and it is recorded on his tombstone that he was the first person who inoculated cowpox to protect from smallpox. Cowpox, or vaccinia, though infectious for cows, is not transmissible among human beings, in other words, as a disease of man it is not infectious. Edward Jenner, the Englishman of Berkeley in |
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