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EDWARD JENNER 17 May 1749-26 January 1823 I. S. BAILEY, M.D., F.R.C.P. Chairman, Jenner Educational Trust. Based on the talk given to a joint meeting of the Western Branch of the Institute of Biology and the History of Biology Group at the Jenner Museum and Conference Centre, Berkeley, Gloucestershire, on 24 April 1993. THOSE of us who come to Berkeley and to the Jenner Museum and Conference Centre do so to honour Edward Jenner, country practitioner, naturalist, scientist and benefactor to mankind. Jenner was born in the old vicarage house, Berkeley, the eight child of the Reverend Stephen Jenner. He was orphaned in early childhood. After school in Wotton-under-Edge and Cirencester: he was apprenticed aged 13 to Daniel Ludlow, a surgeon in Chipping Sodbury. In childhood he had been inoculated against the smallpox, a procedure introduced from the east in the early part of the eighteenth century. He had the usual several weeks of preparation with purging, starving and bleeding. The risk of severe smallpox and of spread to others was recognised, and Jenner was isolated in the "smallpox stables" and suffered a moderate attack. Around 1768, when in Chipping Sodbury, he learnt that there was a report rife in the dairies of a distemper named the cowpox which affected the teats of milking cows, infected the hands of milkmaids and was sometimes a preventive of smallpox. After seven years as an apprentice, he became house pupil to John Hunter (1728-1795) the noted surgeon, experimentalist and teacher, and studied with him in his home and at St. George’s Hospital. When Joseph Banks returned in 1771 from Cook’s Pacific explorations, he asked Hunter who might best help in classifying the material. Jenner was recommended and did so well that, according to Lettsom, he was offered the post of Botanist to a new expedition on the Resolution. He refused, however, partly because of an attachment to the rural scenes and habits of his early youth, and returned to Berkeley in 1772.
