1796 JENNER INOCULATES AGAINST SMALLPOX
Doctor Edward Jenner deliberately infected a young boy with deadly smallpox in a tense moment in his country surgery in Gloucestershire.
Eight-year-old James Phipps, the son of Jenner’s gardener, had previously been infected with pus from a relatively harmless cowpox pustule taken from the hands of a milkmaid. He had become mildly ill with cowpox but was fine after a week. On 1 July 1796, Jenner performed his historic experiment with smallpox and waited anxiously for days, but James did not go on to develop the disease, now or on the subsequent occasions when Jenner infected him with different doses.
Jenner had proved both that cowpox could be passed from person to person (and not just from cow to person) and that it protected against smallpox. This dreaded disease killed up to one in five of those infected and left the rest horribly pockmarked. Your ancestors will have known the fear of smallpox, particularly for children, and will have seen many people every day with its disfiguring after-effects.
Jenner was a vicar's son from Berkeley in Gloucestershire. He went to a grammar school, trained as an apothecary and studied medicine under John Hunter, who was one of the most distinguished surgeons of his day. Hunter introduced Jenner to leading figures in science, including Joseph Banks who had sailed with Captain Cook to the South Seas; Jenner helped arrange and catalogue the specimens Cook had brought back.
Jenner chose not to take up an offer of a partnership with Hunter and became a country doctor with a well-to-do practice in Cheltenham, where his wide intellectual
interests led him to be the founder of the Cheltenham Literary and Philosophical Society.
In his work on smallpox, Jenner was building on an existing preventive treatment, introduced into Britain early in the 18th century by travellers in the east where it had long been used. This involved giving a tiny amount of smallpox via a scratch on the arm from an infected person to a child, in the hope that it would give a limited disease and confer protection. Jenner underwent the procedure, called variolation, when he was a child. Of course, there was a high risk that it would result in the patient developing the disease it was supposed to prevent.
Jenner had also paid attention to the rural folk wisdom that milkmaids who recovered from cowpox, a mild, localised disease acquired when milking infected cows, were immune to smallpox. He investigated cases where individuals had contracted cowpox and assessed their immunity from smallpox. That led to his dangerous experiment with James Phipps.
Jenner published the findings of 23 cases in 1798 to demonstrate his thinking; within two years it was translated in various European languages and the process, called vaccination after the Latin word for cow, was widely adopted. There was some opposition on the grounds that it was ungodly to put animal material into humans, and caricatures appeared showing people growing cows’ heads after they had been vaccinated. Jenner, a typical gentleman of science, was also a keen fossil collector, and he made contributions to ornithology in his observation of cuckoos. In 1801, he predicted the worldwide eradication of smallpox using his methods – and in 1979, almost 200 years later, it was eventually achieved.
Revolutionary fears
There was continuing discontent this year over the high price of bread, the staple food for most people, due to harvest failures. This was ominous: the King and his ministers knew that the recent French Revolution had entered its fateful stage over bread riots when King Louis XVI surrendered the Paris streets to the mob and withdrew to Versailles. King George III therefore insisted on being seen in public to show that he was not intimidated. His resolve was tested in February when he and Queen Charlotte went to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. The evening did not go well; a brick was thrown from the crowd which hit a footman riding on the back of their coach. Then, in Pall Mall, a large stone shattered the side window of the carriage, hitting the Queen in the face and landing on the lap of her lady-in-waiting.
A £1,000 reward was offered for information leading to the arrest of the culprit, but no one was apprehended. The government reacted with stiffer penalties for attacking the Cown, not only physically, but with words. Many verbal attacks previously prosecutable as sedition now became punishable by death as high treason.
Electing a Garrat mayor
There was an election this year which took place over a period of several months, from 25 May to 29 June 1796. There was no doubt that William Pitt’s coalition would be re-elected in the corrupt and chaotic world of British politics. Only five per cent of the adult population could vote, but the public made up for their low representation by engaging in raucous behaviour at election time.
The most lively jaunts happened at the Garrat Elections, occurring at a tiny hamlet in Surrey (now Wandsworth), where the public elected a mock ‘mayor’ of Garrat Green at the Leather Bottle Inn. The candidates were always tradesmen and they usually had a physical deformity which, with the cruel humour of the day, added to the amusement. They were always wits who could give as good as they got verbally.
The most successful mayor, reigning at the beginning of this year, was Jeffrey Dunstan, a wig seller. He was a foundling who took his name from the parish of St Dunstans-in-theEast where he had been abandoned before being brought up in the workhouse. He was just four feet tall, had knock-knees and a large head. However, he did not allow his disabilities to dominate his life, his speech was said to be “marked by irresistible humour, and he never appeared without a train of boys and curious persons whom he entertained by his sallies of wit, shrewd sayings and smart repartees”.
Tens of thousands would come on a chosen Sunday during the election to drink and witness the hustings which saw the candidates making absurd promises.
Voters were people who had been “admitted peaceably and quietly into possession of a freehold thatched tenement, either black, brown or coral, in hedge or
A LARGE STONE SHATTERED THE SIDE WINDOW OF THE CARRIAGE, HITTING THE QUEEN IN THE FACE
ditch, against gate or stile, under furze or fen, on any common or common field, or enclosure, in the high road, or any of the lanes, in barn, stable, hovel, or any other place within the manor of Garrat… and that you did then and there and in the said tenement, discharge”. This was an innuendo in cod legal language implying that voters had to have had sex with any woman at any place in Garrat. Such laboured sexual metaphors were common in 18th-century writing. This year saw the final election of a Garrat mayor; society was becoming more sober.
Changing attitudes
Mental institutions had been awful places; viewing the mentally ill was sometimes even offered as a paid entertainment and the mad were compared to beasts. Where ‘treatment’ took place, it was usually a grim regime of manacles to control the insane, purges to rectify their bodily imbalances and sudden immersion in cold baths to shock the madness out of them.
New attitudes were developing, and this year saw the opening of the York Retreat. This institution in Lamel Hill in York was founded by Quakers. The Quakers insisted that insane people were not beasts, but that the inner light of the spirit was present in all humanity. They criticised existing asylums and set up the Retreat, at first just for Quakers, but later open to everyone.
Its regime used occupational therapy, walks and constructive work such as farm labouring; little medical treatment was administered. An atmosphere of communal living was encouraged. Residents wore their own clothing and were allowed to wander around the estate, though they could not leave without permission. This ‘moral treatment’ became the model for asylums around the world.