Edward Jenner performs the first smallpox vaccination

On 14 May 1796 the English country doctor Edward Jenner took pus from a cowpox sore on the hand of the dairymaid Sarah Nelmes and scratched it into the arm of an eight-year-old boy, James Phipps. Weeks later, he exposed the boy to smallpox, and Phipps did not become ill. Jenner had noticed the folk belief that milkmaids who caught cowpox did not get smallpox. His method, called vaccination from the Latin vacca, spread across the world and eventually led to the global eradication of smallpox, declared by the World Health Organization in 1980.

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