Popular Science Monthly - Oct, Nov, Dec, 1915 — Volume 86 by Anonymous
page 110 of 485 (22%)
page 110 of 485 (22%)
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together.
Cowpox had broken out on a farm near Berkeley and a dairy maid called Sarah Neames contracted the disease. On May 14, 1796, Dr. Jenner took some fluid from a sore on this woman's hand and inoculated it by slight scratching into the arm of a healthy boy eight years old, by name James Phipps. The boy had the usual "reaction" or attack of vaccinia, a disorder indistinguishable from the mildest form of smallpox. After an interval of six weeks, on July 1, Jenner made the most momentous but justifiable experiment, for he inoculated James Phipps with smallpox by lymph taken from a sore on a case of genuine, well-marked, human smallpox, AND THE BOY DID NOT TAKE THE DISEASE AT ALL. Jenner waited till the nineteenth of the month, and finding that the boy had still not developed variola, he could hardly write for joy. "Listen," he wrote to Gardner, "to the most delightful part of my story. The boy has since been inoculated for the smallpox which, aS I VERNTURED TO PREDICT, produced no effect. I shall now pursue my experiments with redoubled ardor." Here we are behind the scenes at a great discovery; "as I ventured to predict"; prediction is part of scientific theorizing; there is a place for legitimate prediction as there is for experimentation. All discoverers have made predictions; Harvey predicted the existence of the capillaries, Halley predicted the return of his comet, Adams predicted the place of the planet Neptune, the missing link in the evolutionary series of the fossil horses had been predicted long before it was actually found by Professor Marsh. Pasteur predicted that the |
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