THE AMATEUR WORD NERD: Vaccinated? Thank an 18th century doctor and his cow

By Barbara McAllister

Word of the Day: Vaccination

If you’ve gotten a vaccination recently, you can thank Edward Jenner, several young children and a cow named Blossom. “Vacca” is the Latin word for cow and the root of the words “vaccine” and “vaccination.” If you know someone with the last name Vaccaro, their ancestors were probably cow herds or cowboys.
In 1796, English physician Edward Jenner discovered that milkmaids often contracted cowpox from handling infected cows, but seemed immune to smallpox, a far deadlier relative of cowpox. Smallpox was a worldwide pandemic that affected millions. It killed Pocahontas at age 21, Louis XV of France at 64 and Peter II of Russia at 15. It also affected Mozart, Elizabeth I, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. It is deadly in about 30 percent of all cases, especially among children. Queen Anne’s only heir died of smallpox at age 11, historically ending the reign of the Stuarts and forever altering British royal succession.
Jenner wasn’t the first to have the idea of immunization using inoculation, but he was the first to do it in a scientific study. He infected his gardener’s 8-year-old son with cowpox virus that came from one of Blossom’s infected blisters. Once the child recovered, Jenner injected the boy with the deadly smallpox virus. Fortunately for Jenner, not to mention the unwitting young subject, the child remained healthy. When Jenner reported the findings of his experiment to the Royal Society in 1797, he was told he needed more proof. Undismayed, he tried the same experiment on several other children, including his own 11-month-old son. In 1798, his results were finally published and Jenner coined the word vaccine from the Latin word for cow. Jenner became known as the father of immunology; the heroic young test subjects became historical footnotes and cows became forever immortalized through the new word conceived by Jenner.