Edward Jenner quotes
Edward Jenner  Smallpox

"In a recent letter from Dr. A. Ward of the Pathology Department, University of Hong Kong, in which he requests permission to use some of our findings in his textbook on immunology, Dr. Ward states:  "I again like you do not worship Louis Pasteur and I consider Edward Jenner to be one of the great criminals of history.' "---Dr Kalokerinos

It was an open secret in the profession that the great discoverer was a disappointing person at close quarters. He was vain, petulant, crafty, and greedy ; he had more of grandiloquence and bounce than of solid attainments. In London, at least, his presence was a bore, and his reputation an incubus, which the profession, outside his own small following, would have gladly got rid of. [1889] Jenner and Vaccination A Strange Chapter of Medical History by Charles Creighton M.D.

It is sufficient to reassert that Jenner did not introduce cowpox.  On the contrary, he rejected cowpox for horsegrease cowpox; and such was his prescription because he knew from the evidence of his neighbourhood that cowpox afforded no protection from smallpox.  It is true that when Pearson discredited horse-grease cowpox, and recommended cowpox, Jenner dropped his prescription, and put himself forward as the discoverer of cowpox; but it is also true that in subsequent years he resumed his original position, and indeed dispensed with the cow altogether, and, like Sacco of Milan and De Carro of Vienna, used and diffused horsegrease or horsepox neat, describing the equine virus as  the true and genuine life-preserving fluid."  [1885] The Story of a Great Delusion by William White

Jenner & Pearson
 It was no discovery of Jenner's that cowpox was inoculable and preventive of smallpox.  That was a rural superstition.  Nor, be it again repeated, did he ever become responsible for that rural superstition.  Recognising its futility, he deliberately set it aside, and recommended a disease of the horse, transmitted through the cow, for inoculation.  It was Pearson, who disliking Jenner's prescription, brought cowpox into vogue; whereon Jenner, fearing that he might be cut out of the enterprise, dropped his specific, adopted the cowpox he had rejected, and claimed Pearson's work as the development of his own.......  Jenner's prescription in the Inquiry of 1798 was not Cowpox.  It was Horsegrease Cowpox.  It was a disease of the horse inoculated on the cow.  Cowpox per se he expressly rejected as useless, having no specific effect on the human constitution.  Pearson and Woodville entertained Jenner's prescription in good faith.  They tried to generate pox on the cow with grease from the horse, but did not succeed.  Reluctantly they abandoned Jenner's prescription, and resorted to Cowpox.[1885] The Story of a Great Delusion by William White

Spurious
In the Report we detect one good service, namely, the explosion of Jenner's fiction about Spurious Cowpox.  When Vaccination was first brought forward, cases were adduced of Smallpox after Cowpox.  Jenner at once asserted that the Cowpox in such instances must have been spurious, for Smallpox after genuine Cowpox was impossible; and Spurious Cowpox was thenceforward freely used to baffle inquirers and to account for failures.  Spurious Cowpox served the ends of the Vaccinators magnificently, but by and by it began to have awkward consequences.  Genuine Cowpox was said to be harmless —it was the Spurious that was ineffective or worked mischief; and the Inoculators plied the terror of Spurious Pox against Vaccination.  It therefore became necessary to clear Spurious Cowpox out of the way, and Jenner, before the College of Physicians, pressed upon the point, "owned up," as Americans say, and authorised the following explanation— 

Some deviations from the usual course have occasionally occurred in Vaccination, which the Author of the practice has called Spurious Cowpox, by which the public have been misled, as if there were a true and a false Cowpox; but it appears that nothing more was meant than to express irregularity or difference from that common form and progress of the vaccine pustule from which its efficacy is inferred.

 Mark! Here was a third definition of Spurious Cow-pox by Jenner.

First, in the Inquiry of 1798, he described Spurious Cowpox as eruptions on the cow underived from horse-grease, producing no erysipelas when inoculated on the human subject, and without effect against Smallpox. True Cowpox was generated from horsegrease, and from horsegrease only.

Second, in the Origin of the Vaccine Inoculation of 1801 all reference to horsegrease was dropped for commercial reasons, whilst the existence of Spurious Cowpox was reasserted "as some varieties of spontaneous eruptions upon the cow."

Third, before the Physicians in 1807, he removed the spurious disease from the cow altogether, saying, nothing more was meant by Spurious Cowpox than variations in the form and progress of vaccine pustules on the arms of the vaccinated !

In short, to vary the phrase of Betsy Prig, "There never was no Spurious Cowpox."  Slippery, very slippery, was the immortal Jenner. [1885] The Story of a Great Delusion by William White

HORSEGREASE  COWPOX.
No man knew better than Jenner that cowpox as cowpox was no preventive of smallpox.
Toward middle-life he had what he conceived to be a happy thought. Cowpox as cowpox he had dismissed as impracticable; but there was a variety of cowpox which he resolved to recommend.
Cows in Gloucestershire were milked by men as well as by women; and men would sometimes milk cows with hands foul from dressing the heels of horses afflicted with what was called grease.    With this grease they infected the cows, and the pox which followed was pronounced by Jenner to have all the virtue against smallpox which the dairymaids claimed for cowpox.
According to Jenner, then, the dairymaids were right, and they were wrong. They were right when the pox they caught was derived from the horse through the cow, they were wrong when the pox they caught originated on the cow without the horse. He thus discriminated a double pox—cowpox of no efficacy against smallpox, and horsegrease cowpox of sure efficacy.
    Further, in this connection, it is to be observed, that farriers believed that when they got poisoned in handling horses with greasy heels, they too, like the dairymaids, were safe from smallpox.
    It is not therefore for cowpox, but for horsegrease cowpox that Jenner is answerable. In cowpox he had not, and could have no faith.
    In 1798 Jenner published his famous Inquiry, treatise much more spoken of than read, wherein he distinctly set forth the origin of his chosen prophylactic. If was not, I repeat, cowpox: it was horsegrease cowpox.  He carefully discriminated it from spontaneous cowpox which, he said, had no protective virtue, being attended with no inflammation and erysipelas, the essential sequences of inoculation with effective virus.
     Then it is remembered that virus for half a dozen or more vaccinations is taken from a single arm, and that this process of reproduction is repeated every week, some may be formed of the extent to which this smallpox cowpox has been diffused over the country. [1885] The Story of a Great Delusion by William White

Even Dr. Major Greenwood, Chief Statistician to the Ministry of Health, declared in 1929 that: " In Jenner's classical paper no mistake was omitted that could possibly have been made, and there was a good deal of evidence that Jenner had been a rogue."  In his well-known work, " Epidemics and Crowd Diseases" (1935), Professor Greenwood wrote: '' Most of Jenner's time during the last twenty years of his life was spent in attempting the impossible, i.e., in attempting to convince his correspondents that no properly cowpoxed person could get smallpox." (p. 264) [1936 Pamphlet] The Case AGAINST Vaccination By M.  BEDDOW BAYLY M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.

"Jenner's sanitary knowledge was of the most shadowy character. He suffered from typhus fever in 1786 and 1794, and on this latter occasion the disease nearly proved fatal. In 1806 a youth of sixteen was received into his house at Berkeley. While there he was twice attacked with typhus, and died of consumption in 1809. During Jenner's stay in London, his two sons fell ill of typhus, and the father, writing to the Rev. John Clinch, says :—'I do not recollect ever seeing a case that arose from the vapour of putrid animal substances.' The origin of typhus in insanitary conditions was evidently unknown to Jenner. That a teacher so unconscious of the elementary laws of sanitation in should be able to compel the submission of posterity to the weight of his 'dead hand'- that his crude speculations, his hypothetical guesses, his reasoning's from analogy, should be imposed on the civilised world as dogmas too sacred for criticism, is a peculiarity of our time which will afford a wide field for the satirists of future ages. CH 69  LEICESTER: SANITATION versus VACCINATION BY J.T. BIGGS J.P.

"I well remember, some years ago, listening to a knighted medical researcher as he spoke, on the radio, about vaccines. He told two classical stories form the history books. The first concerned Edward Jenner who, according to history, watched as the milkmaid caught cowpox and this protected her from smallpox. So Jenner got some of the 'cowpox' and inoculated it into someone's arm - it fostered and the pus was then inoculated into someone else - 100% success was claimed. 100%!! How absurd - complete with all sorts of germs including hepatitis, syphilis and whatever. If one did that today, without antibiotics, the death rate would be huge."---Dr Kalokerinos, M.D.

"I won’t go now into the personal character of Jenner, but Dr. Creighton has well described him when he tells us that he was vain and petulant, crafty and greedy, a man with more grandiloquence and bounce than solid attainment, unscrupulous to a degree, a man who in all his writings was never precise when he could possibly be vague, and never straightforward when he could be secretive. This is the character that Dr. Creighton gives him; and as for the statement, which we constantly hear, that Jenner received such wonderful homage in the later years of his life, we well know that his closing years were years of misery as the failures of his fetish began to crowd upon him. It was on January 23rd, 1823, that he wrote his last letter to his confidential friend, Gardner, when he told him he was never surrounded by so many perplexities. Two days later Jenner breathed his last."--Dr Hadwen MD

"In baron’s Life of Jenner, vol 1, p135, the following incident is given:--“His nephew, George Jenner, went into the stable with him to look at a horse with diseased heels.  “There,” said he, pointing to the horse’s heels, “is the source of smallpox.”
    Query.—Was Jenner sane?  I think not.   This little scene, so neatly got up, that his greed for gold had obscured his judgment.    Jenner’s philanthropy began and ended with himself. Better for him had he never been born than that science, in his hands, should have established a craze—a craze whose dire mischief has now cursed the earth for seventy-five years.
    Dr. Birch, a contemporary of Jenner, and physician to the then Prince of Wales, (afterwards George IV.), foresaw all this calamity, and foretold that England would one day find that the vaccine dogma was "a public infatuation." His grave-stone, to this day, hands down that opinion to posterity."---JNO. PICKERING, F.S.S., F.R.G.S. [1876. THE STATISTICS OF THE MEDICAL OFFICERS TO THE LEEDS SMALL-POX HOSPITAL EXPOSED AND REFUTED]

"Anyone who reads Jenner’s alleged Inquiry can see for himself that his specific was not cowpox, but horsegrease transferred to the cow by the hands of a dirty milker. Ordinary cowpoxes were "spurious". It was the London doctors, Pearson and Woodville, who forced the spurious cowpox on the public and on Jenner. They knew the smell of horsegrease and would not touch it with the end of a bargepole."--Lionel Dole

"In 1811 there had occurred a notable instance of failure. Lord Robert Grosvenor, ten years of age, who had been vaccinated by Jenner himself, was now taken with small-pox, and lay hovering between life and death. Jenner sat by the bedside of his illustrious patient, and when at last the boy began to turn and get better Jenner turned to the father with "What a lucky job he was vaccinated. If he had not been, he would surely have died." Thus Jenner started the glorious doctrine of mitigation, which has been handed down as the heirloom of the medical vaccinists ever since."--Dr Hadwen MD

"I again like you do not worship Louis Pasteur and I consider Edward Jenner to be one of the great criminals of history."---Dr. A. Ward of the Pathology Dept, University of Hong Kong (in a letter to Dr Kalokerinos).

[Book 1957] THE POISONED NEEDLE by Eleanor McBean:
Edward Jenner inoculated his 18 months old son with swine-pox, on November 1791 and again in April, 1798 with cow-pox. The boy was never very well after that and died of tuberculosis at the age of 21.

In Baron’s Life of Jenner, (Vol. II, p. 304) we learn that, "On the 14th of May, 1796 . . . Jenner vaccinated James Phipps, a boy about eight years old, with the matter taken from the hand of a dairymaid infected with casual cow-pox.

After waiting six weeks Jenner inoculated this boy on both arms with smallpox matter, taken from the arm of a boy with smallpox. Several months later Phipps was again inoculated with the variolous matter (smallpox pus) but no effect was produced."

The inoculation didn’t "take" so on the strength of this one experiment and its questionable interpretation, Jenner based his claim that one vaccination would "forever secure a person from smallpox." No time had elapsed to prove whether it would last a lifetime or a month or at all; but without any proof or any scientific basis or evidence for its practice, the doctors and the government adopted it and made it compulsory, no doubt, seeing the gold mine in profits that it would yield.

James Phipps was declared immune to smallpox but be too, died of tuberculosis at the age of 20.

In Baron’s Life of Jenner, the author refers to Phipps condition as follows:

"While walking with a friend one day they passed young Phipps, when Jenner exclaimed, ‘Oh, there is poor Phipps; I wish you could see him; he has been very unwell lately and I am afraid he has got tuberculosis on his lungs. He was recently inoculated for smallpox, I believe for the 20th time, and all without effect.’"