Book reviews: Out, damned spots!

Richard B. Fisher, Edward Jenner 1749-823.London: André Deutsch, 1991. Pp. 361, £20.00. ISBN 0 233 98681 2 In the summer of 1796, Joseph Banks, long-serving President of the Royal Society, turned down Jenner’s Inquiry on what he called the variolae vaccinae as ‘inadequate’ for publication in the Philosophical Transactions . Barely two years later a revised version, with several additions to the originally very few experimental cowpox inoculations, was published privately. The blurb’s claim that Jenner thus ‘freed mankind from "the spotted plague", smallpox’, seems an exaggerated tribute which ignores the hard work of successive later generations to provide a safe, theoretical basis for Jenner’s empiricism, and also the enormous technical and financial resources invested by the World Health Organization in the prolonged global campaign which finally achieved eradication of smallpox nearly 200 years later. Even within Edward Jenner’s own lifetime, the story of the progress of ‘vaccination’ as opposed to ‘variolation’ was a complex one, not helped by his failure to realize the need for periodic re-vaccination.