In 1796, Edward Jenner tested a popular belief: that cowpox protected against smallpox. He obtained cowpox material from a milkmaid and used it to inoculate an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps, whom he then deliberately exposed to smallpox. Because the boy did not fall ill, Jenner concluded that the procedure—cowpoxing, later given the more scientific-sounding and mysterious name vaccination (from vacca, Latin for cow)—was effective and conferred lifelong protection. On March 17, 1802, he informed the House of Commons that vaccination was entirely safe, granted lifelong immunity, and would rid the world of smallpox.
From the outset, however, many regarded this new notion—built on eighty years of smallpox inoculation—as anything but safe or effective. Yet the idea took hold almost immediately. As Dr. William Rowley, MD, observed in 1805—less than a decade since vaccination had started— “Whoever had not taken the oaths of supremacy and allegiance to vaccination, or who dared to doubt the infallibility of Cow-pox inoculation even in its infancy, even before any judgement could be formed, were ignominiously treated as traitors to the royal vaccinating state, as rebellious subjects to the Jennerian despotic power.” Decades later, Dr. Charles Creighton likewise noted how firmly this idea had taken root: by 1801, he wrote, professors and others of his class “on the Continent as well as in England were already deeply committed“ and that “anyone who undertakes to answer for Jenner and his theories, must shatter his own reputation for scientific and historical knowledge.”
What follows is not a history of vaccination’s triumphs but a record of its failures—drawn almost entirely from the testimony of physicians who witnessed them firsthand. The timeline that unfolds across the following decades chronicles smallpox vaccination’s inability to shield against the very disease it promised to conquer, together with the injuries and deaths that followed in its trail. The quotations assembled here, spanning 1799 to 1910, call into question the triumphant narrative so widely accepted about this medical intervention.
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