Jenner and Smallpox

Here are a couple of videos on Edward Jenner
Video 1
Video 2
Video 3- What smallpox does to the body- a little gross
Video 4

Cowpox

Like any other doctor of the time, Edward Jenner carried out variolation (the deliberate infection of a person with a weakened form of smallpox, which caused a weak infection, after which came a quick recovery) to protect his patients from a more serious and usually life-threatening smallpox infection. However, from the early days of his career Edward Jenner had been intrigued by country-lore which said that people who caught cowpox from their cows could not catch smallpox. This and his own experience with variolation as a boy and the risks that accompanied it (1-2% of people died) led him to undertake the most important research of his life.
Cowpox is a mild viral infection of cows. It causes a few weeping spots (pocks) on their udders, but little discomfort. Milkmaids occasionally caught cowpox from the cows. Although they felt rather off-color for a few days and developed a small number of pocks, usually on the hand, the disease did not trouble them.


The First Vaccination
In May 1796 a dairymaid, Sarah Nelmes, consulted Jenner about a rash on her hand. He diagnosed cowpox rather than smallpox and Sarah confirmed that one of her cows, a Gloucester cow called Blossom, had recently had cowpox. Edward Jenner realized that this was his opportunity to test the protective properties of cowpox by giving it to someone who had not yet suffered smallpox.
He chose James Phipps, the eight-year old son of his gardener. On 14th May he made a few scratches on one of James' arms and rubbed into them some material from one of the pocks on Sarah's hand. A few days later James became mildly ill with cowpox but was well again a week later. So Jenner knew that cowpox could pass from person to person as well as from cow to person.
The next step was to test whether the cowpox would now protect James from smallpox. On 1st July Jenner variolated the boy. As Jenner anticipated, and undoubtedly to his great relief, James did not develop even the weak form of smallpox, either on this occasion or on the many later times when his immunity was tested again.

1. What is the question Jenner was trying to answer?
2. What is the manipulated variable?
3. What is the responding variable?
4. Write a hypothesis statement.
5. Describe his test.
6. What conclusions did he come to?