Vaccine and vaccination

These early months of 2020 have been filled with words (coronavirus, COVID-19) and phrases (sheltering at home, social distancing) that are new or coming into wider usage. Certainly, the words vaccine and vaccination have been used for more than 200 years, but what are their origins?

Vaccine comes from the name for the cowpox virus, vaccinia, which comes from the Latin vacca meaning cow. This pox virus attacked cows. 

In 1796, the British doctor Edward Jenner gave a young patient what became known as the first “vaccinia vaccine” - a vaccine made from the cowpox virus, - in an attempt to protect him from the human form of the pox virus. These first vaccinations were crude by today's standards. Jenner took pus from the cowpox lesions on a milkmaid’s hands and introduced that fluid into a cut he made in the arm of an 8-year-old boy.

When Jenner exposed the boy to smallpox 6 weeks later (!) he did not develop the infection. He also seemed immune to subsequent exposures and lived to age 65.

A caricature by James Gillray "The Cow Pock" of Jenner vaccinating patients who feared it would make them sprout cowlike appendages - Library of Congress, Public Domain, Link

His vaccine practice was not immediately accepted. People feared the counterintuitive idea of introducing a disease into your body in order to fight disease. And the idea of using something from an animal in your body was repulsive. Jenner submitted a paper about his new procedure to the prestigious Royal Society of London, but it was rejected. The president of the Society told Jenner that it was a mistake to risk his reputation by publishing something so controversial.

Jenner published his ideas at his own expense in a short pamphlet in 1798 which was widely read and discussed. Novelist Jane Austen noted in one of her letters that she’d been at a dinner party and everyone was talking about the “Jenner pamphlet.” 

The vaccination process evolved but in that time even the idea of germs was unknown so poor sanitation and dirty needles contributed to issues from the process

Jenner used the word vaccine in his writing and his friend, Richard Dunning, used "vaccination" in 1800, but the Oxford English Dictionary credits the French for coining the term vaccine in 1800 and vaccination in 1803. There are cognates in other languages (Italian, vaccine, Portuguese, vacina, and Spanish, vacuna). 

Today, viral tissue culture methods that were developed starting in the 1950s led to the advent of the Salk (inactivated) polio vaccine and the Sabin (live attenuated oral) polio vaccine. Despite there still be a small minority of anti-vaccination critics, mass polio immunization has now eradicated the disease from many regions around the world.