Vaccination Records Article in Ancestors Magazine

I’ve written an article on vaccination records in the upcoming April edition of Ancestors Magazine.

We often think of vaccinations as being part of modern medicine, but inoculation against smallpox was compulsory in England and Wales between 1853 and 1948, taking vaccination records well back into the Victorian era.

After the Second World War many other vaccinations became compulsory, in effect handing the baton of vaccination records from the smallpox jab to a new generation of vaccines.

Smallpox is probably the most famous vaccine in medical history because it was one of the first to be documented in a scientific way. From the 1770s onwards smallpox was widely feared in England because of its near one-in-three mortality rate and disfiguring effects on the body.

Scientist Edward Jenner noticed that the milk maids on the farmland surrounding his Gloucestershire home did not contract it.

Jenner’s investigations lead him to establish that they had all contracted the much less virulent cowpox when they were young, and for some reason this more benign disease protected them form smallpox in later life.

Jenner tested his theory on n 14 May 1796, inserting material from a milk maid’s cowpox blisters into an incision in the skin of eight-year-old James Phipps. Phipps contracted cowpox and suffered a slight fever, but afterwards he never contracted smallpox.

This inoculation works because cowpox and smallpox are similar in make-up. Once the body has developed the ability to recognize cowpox, including a set of antibodies to fight the pathogen, it has also done the same for smallpox. Thus upon infection by either disease the immune system reacts instantly and effectively to prevent it taking hold.

The use of cowpox to inoculate against small pox had been recorded in China and the Ottoman Empire since the 1500s, but Jenner’s great breakthrough was scientifically testing the method and starting the basis of modern immunology.