CDS (I) 2020 General Knowledge · Question 30 of 120

Correct — A, Edward Jenner. Jenner, an English physician, tested the country observation that people who had caught cowpox did not take smallpox. On 14 May 1796 he inoculated James Phipps, the eight-year-old son of his gardener, with matter from cowpox blisters on the hand of a milkmaid, Sarah Nelmes. Phipps developed a fever and nothing more. On 1 July that year Jenner challenged him with smallpox material by the usual method of the time, and no disease followed. Others had tried cowpox before him; his distinct contribution was to prove that those inoculated were then immune, and to show the protection could be passed from person to person. The words vaccine and vaccination come from his term for cowpox, variolae vaccinae, the pustules of the cow.

• (b)Robert Koch — Koch belongs to bacteriology, not to immunisation. He identified the organisms of anthrax, tuberculosis and cholera and framed the postulates that link a microbe to a disease.
• (c)Robert Hooke — Hooke was a seventeenth-century natural philosopher who looked at cork through a microscope and gave the cell its name. He has no connection with vaccination.
• (d)Carl Linnaeus — Linnaeus devised the binomial system of naming and the hierarchical classification of living things. His field is taxonomy, not medicine.

Before Jenner the only protection against smallpox was variolation — deliberate infection with smallpox itself, which conferred immunity but could kill the patient and could start an outbreak. Jenner's insight was to substitute a related but far milder infection, cowpox, so that the immune system met a harmless rehearsal of the real disease. That principle, exposing the body to a safe form of a pathogen so it can recognise the dangerous one later, is what all vaccination since has rested on.

Four scientists, each firmly attached to one idea, so the item rewards a well-kept mental index rather than any reasoning. Koch goes with bacteria and disease-causing organisms, Hooke with the cell, Linnaeus with classification, Jenner with vaccination. The trap for a hurried candidate is Koch, because bacteriology and immunisation sit close together in a syllabus; the separation to hold is that Koch found what causes diseases while Jenner found how to prevent one. As a marker of how far the method went, the World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated in 1980, the only human disease so far removed from the world, and the last indigenous Indian case was in 1975.

• Edward Jenner, 1749 to 1823, was an English physician who created the smallpox vaccine, the world's first vaccine.
• He inoculated James Phipps with cowpox matter on 14 May 1796 and challenged him with smallpox material on 1 July 1796.
• The words vaccine and vaccination come from variolae vaccinae, Jenner's term for cowpox.
• Britain banned variolation in 1840 and provided free vaccination using cowpox.
• The World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated in 1980.

• Choosing Koch, whose work on disease-causing bacteria sits next to this topic in most syllabuses.
• Crediting Louis Pasteur with the first vaccine; Pasteur extended the principle and coined the general term, but Jenner came first.
• Confusing variolation, which uses smallpox itself, with vaccination, which uses cowpox.

As a scientist-to-discovery match, or through the eradication of smallpox and the immunisation programmes that followed.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The words 'vaccine' and 'vaccination' are derived from the Latin name for which one of the following?

  • (a)Cowpox
  • (b)Smallpox
  • (c)Chickenpox
  • (d)Rabies

  Answer(a) Cowpox — from variolae vaccinae, the term Jenner used for the cowpox pustules he took his material from.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following diseases has been declared eradicated worldwide by the World Health Organization?

  • (a)Polio
  • (b)Smallpox
  • (c)Tuberculosis
  • (d)Measles

  Answer(b) Smallpox — declared eradicated in 1980, the first human disease to be removed from the world.