There is no doubt that Jenner"s medical contemporaries, at

least in England, failed to appreciate the magnitude of the
gift their colleague had presented not merely to his own
country, but to the world at large
There is no doubt that Jenner"s medical contemporaries, at
least in England, failed to appreciate the magnitude of the
gift their colleague had presented not merely to his own
country, but to the world at large. The discovery had, of
course, been led up to by several different lines of
indication, but this in no way detracts from the genius of
Jenner in drawing his memorable inductions from the few facts
which others had known before his time. The fame of Newton is
no whit diminished because Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo lived
and worked before him, the credit due to Harvey is none the
less because many before his time had worked on the problem of
the heart and vessels, and because some of them, notably
Cesalpinus, came within a very little of the discovery of the
circulation; the achievements of Darwin are not to be belittled
because Lamarck, Malthus or Monboddo had notions in accordance
with the tenor of his great generalization of evolution among
living beings. Certainly Jenner had precursors; but it was his
genius and his genius alone which, putting together the various
fragments of knowledge already possessed, gave us the grand but
simple induction based on his own experiments that vaccinia
prevents from variola. It was too simple and too new to be
appreciated in all its bearings either by the medical men or
the laity of his own day. Its impressiveness is not inherent in
it, as it is in the mathematical demonstration of universal
gravitation, as it is in the atomic theory or in that of the
survival of the fittest through natural selection. The English
country doctor merely said in essence--'let me give you cowpox
and you will not get smallpox.' Unless the fact of this
immunity is regarded as possessed by all the nations of the
world for ever more there is nothing particularly impressive in
it; and so it failed to impress his contemporaries. It is only
when we contrast the loathsomeness and danger of smallpox with
the mildness and safety of vaccinia and varioloid that we grasp
the greatness of the work which Jenner did for mankind. The
very simplicity of vaccination detracts from its impressiveness
unless its results are viewed through the vista of the
centuries. We need the proper historical perspective in this as
in all else. Thus viewed, however, the simplicity of the
procedure and the universality of its application are most
imposing. Vaccination does not, indeed, dazzle the scientific
imagination like some of the other generalizations of biology,
but it is one that has been gloriously vindicated by the
subsequent history of the world"s hygiene.