The History of Immunisation

by Read Listen Learn


In about 1920, medicine cured more people than it killed for the first time in history. Hospitals were very dirty and it was possible for patients to get serious infections and die. The same was true in operating theatres, although they were starting to get cleaner. The most important reasons that medicine got better were antibiotics and, vitally, immunisation.

Immunisation came very late to Europe. It was the late eighteenth century before a country surgeon called Edward Jenner tried immunising an eight-year-old boy called James Phipps against smallpox. This disease killed many, many people every year and also blinded thousands of others. Jenner noticed that women working on dairy farms never caught the disease. Because he was a country doctor, he probably also heard about farmers making cuts on healthy people and putting scabs from sick people into these wounds. This was not enough to make healthy people sick but it stopped them getting seriously ill later with smallpox. Nobody knew why this worked but people who travelled around Britain used it.

In fact, the British Army in India knew that the Moghuls made cuts on their soldiers’ arms and put scabs from people who had smallpox on these. The wife of the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Lady Mary Montagu, had seen this in Istanbul decades before and did the same to her own children, but it never became popular at home.

The reason Jenner’s answer was different was that he discovered cows had a different disease from smallpox, called cow pox, which many women on farms caught. However, it was not serious in human beings and so the girls could continue to work and, later, never got the often fatal disease, smallpox. He also found that the disease could travel from cows to people and from one person to another. He then made a vaccine. (Interestingly, the word ‘vaccination’ comes from the Latin word ‘vacca’, meaning ‘cow’.)

In 1840, the British Parliament offered free vaccinations to the poor, but very few people used these. Thirteen years later, they had to use them. However, the poor were not happy about the new law and they fought against it and many people were killed. They could not understand why only poor people needed vaccinations. Also, they did not want travelling doctors to make cuts on their month-old babies’ arms and then put smallpox scabs into them. The babies often became sick. The officials used knives that were not clean and open cuts often killed their children because people could not keep the wounds clean. The same thing happened in Indian villages. People welcomed vaccination when smallpox was killing thousands, but did not want it when everyone was healthy.

In France, Louis Pasteur (1822 – 1895) was also working on making vaccines for rabies. His method was different. He made rabbits sick with the disease and then did the same with the next generation of rabbits. Of course, later generations could fight the disease better and so did not die. Pasteur then took blood with a weak form of the disease from these rabbits and used it to vaccinate people against rabies.

A man that Pasteur hated, the German scientist Robert Koch (1843 – 1910), was also working on a vaccination against an often fatal disease, tuberculosis (also called TB). In 1884, he wrote four ‘postulates’, which are now the basis of the science of immunology:

The TB micro-organism must be found in large numbers in all bodies with the disease but never in healthy bodies.

The micro-organism must be isolated from other cells and grown in a pure culture.

The micro-organism grown in the culture should lead to TB when it is put into a healthy body.

The micro-organism found in the newly-diseased body must again be isolated and shown to be exactly the same as the original TB micro-organism.

(Although Koch was talking especially about TB and cholera, the postulates are true of any disease.)

You will see that the first, second and last of Koch’s postulates use the word ‘must’ but the third one has ‘should’ instead. This is because Koch showed that not all healthy bodies will get cholera or TB when micro-organisms are put in them.

It was not until 1891 when Elie Mechnikov explained the importance of the immune system in fighting diseases that Koch's work was recognised and he won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1905. Mechnikov then won it in 1908.

It is interesting to see that, although immunisation has been vital in controlling disease, it has only cured smallpox. The last case in the world was in Somalia in 1977.

Sadly, it may be too soon to say that these diseases are over, as bio-terrorism makes it possible that they will cause many more deaths yet.