Early modern Britain 1509–1745, Year 11: hospitals, John Hunter and vaccination (Health and the people option)

By gifts from wealthy individuals

提示Thomas Guy was a rich merchant.

为什么Many hospitals had closed when the monasteries were dissolved. New general and specialist hospitals were founded in the 17th and 18th centuries, and more of them employed physicians and surgeons. Treatment was still usually based on the four humours.

By dissecting human and animal bodies himself and experimenting

提示He trusted observation over books.

为什么He set up his own anatomy school in London in 1764. He urged his pupils to test ideas for themselves, and he helped to turn surgery from a craft into a science.

They respected his expertise too much to question him

提示A great reputation can protect a wrong idea.

为什么Hunter prepared nearly 14,000 anatomical specimens, which survive as the Hunterian Museum in London, and he made real discoveries by observation and experiment, for example about gunshot wounds. His case shows that an individual can hold medicine back as well as move it forward.

Edward Jenner

提示A country doctor from Gloucestershire.

为什么Jenner studied surgery and anatomy under Hunter in London, and the two went on exchanging letters for years.

1745

提示The year of the last Jacobite rising.

为什么It became the Royal College of Surgeons in London in 1800. The standing of surgeons rose as they began to study anatomy seriously, often at private schools such as the one run by John Hunter's brother William.

Inoculation (variolation)

提示Lady Mary Wortley Montagu brought the method to England from Turkey.

为什么She had her daughter treated in London in 1721. The method usually worked, but it was risky: a small number of people died of the smallpox they were given, and they could infect others.

1796

提示Two years before he published his findings.

为什么He took matter from a cowpox sore on the hand of a dairymaid, Sarah Nelmes, and scratched it into the boy's arm. When he later gave the boy smallpox matter, the boy did not fall ill. He published his findings in 1798.

Those who had caught cowpox did not catch smallpox

提示A mild illness from their work seemed to protect them.

为什么The word 'vaccination' comes from the Latin name Jenner gave to cowpox, 'variolae vaccinae', meaning 'pustules of the cow'. It was safer than inoculation because cowpox is a mild disease in humans.

Explain why vaccination worked

提示Germ theory lay more than sixty years in the future.

为什么He published his findings in 1798. Nobody yet understood why the vaccine worked, and opposition delayed its widespread use in Britain until later in the 19th century.

1853

提示Thirty years after Jenner's death.

为什么The government had begun to pay for free vaccination in 1840, when it also banned the older method of inoculation. Compulsion provoked an organised anti-vaccination movement.

Vaccination threatened their income

提示Think about what they stood to lose.

为什么Inoculators and some churchmen were among the groups most opposed to vaccination at first. Opposition to a medical change can come from self-interest as well as from honest doubt about the evidence.