In this narrated YouTube video, author and literacy advocate Lois Letchford introduces her "Change the World" series and profiles Edward Jenner (1749‑1823), the English country doctor credited with pioneering vaccination. Letchford contextualizes the deadly impact of smallpox in 17th‑18th‑century Europe, noting its high mortality rates and the eventual eradication of the disease in the 1970s. She explains Jenner’s observation that cowpox infection conferred immunity to smallpox, describing his 1796 experiments with the eight‑year‑old James Phipps, who was first inoculated with cowpox and later with smallpox pus, demonstrating lasting immunity. The video also acknowledges earlier, lesser‑known contributors—an unnamed Dorset farmer (1774) and physician John Brewster (1765)—who hinted at the vaccination principle before Jenner, but whose work was overlooked. Letchford draws a parallel between historical smallpox vaccination and contemporary COVID‑19 challenges, urging viewers to appreciate the risks and breakthroughs of scientific pioneers. The video ends with typical YouTube calls to like, subscribe, and share.
Chapters
Hello, I am Lois Letchford. I'm the author of the book Reversed: A Memoir, and I consider myself a literacy problem solver. And I'm sharing with you this series called Change the World, and it's people whose research changed the world and changed the way we view things. And I love looking back at what these people did and sharing it with children to know that their journeys were not simple nor straightforward. They took lots of risks and faced many challenges from the community as a whole. So today we're learning about Edward Jenner, born in 1749 and died in 1823. He was the English country doctor who began the quest of Looking at smallpox, and it begins. And this is from the book Eureka! Scientists Who Shaped Human History. We tend to underestimate what a killer smallpox was. Like today, I think we underestimate what COVID is doing in our society. The disease was successful. Successfully eradicated in the late 1970s thanks to stringent vaccination programs. But that was the end of the war that had waged for well over 200 years. Before the start of that war, smallpox devastated human populations in the 17th and 18th centuries in London. Smallpox was likely responsible for about 10% of all deaths, and some estimates put that toll as high as twice that. A technique was developed by the early 18th century that could sometimes give people protection against the deadly disease. Edward Jenner was a doctor in the English county of Gloucestershire. He had a passion for natural history and was the first person to discover that it was the cuckoo chick that hied the other eggs out of the nest and not, as had been earlier thought, the adult host birds. For this work, he was in 1788 was elected to the Royal Society. There was the disease that infected many people in the countryside. called cowpox because initially it took hold of cows' teats and from there spread by contact with the hands of milkers. It was rather like smallpox and had the same symptoms but not as deadly. Jenner, a country doctor, noticed that patients of his who'd had cowpox seemed completely immune to the effects of smallpox, even when he inoculated them. He even saw instances where smallpox had wiped out entire families except for those members who had suffered with cowpox. In 1796, Jenner did something That would today would be considered unethical, but this is early in research life. Things change enormously. Aged 8, James Phipps was one of Jenner's patients. Although there was nothing wrong with him, Jenner deliberately infected him with cowpox. A few weeks later, after James's attack on the disease had come and gone, Jenner deliberately inoculated him with smallpox pus, and James showed complete immunity. Just to check, Jenner repeated the smallpox inoculation a few months later with the same results. Of course, had Jenner been wrong, it could have been a very different outcome. He wasn't wrong, and so was born The era of vaccination. What isn't generally known is that Jenner wasn't the first to discover the principle of vaccination. A couple of decades earlier, in 1774, an English county of Dorset was devastated by a major smallpox epidemic. A farmer noticed the immunity to the killer that prior infection with seemed to confer, and in desperation infected himself and his family with the lesser disease. The farmer Jester went public with the success of his experiment, but presumably because he was a farmer rather than a physician, nobody took any notice. Even earlier, in 1765, the physician John Brewster friend of Jenner's, wrote a paper noting that immunization cowpox offered against smallpox. Although since Fewspur never published it and Jenner was a teenager at the time, it's quite possible the younger man knew nothing of the paper's existence. So it was Edgen— Edward Jenner who began our knowledge of vaccinations. And think of that as we face COVID today. Thank you. Hit like, hit subscribe, and share with others.
