Gratitude to cows

Thinking recently about our debt to cows, what they have given us...
 
Meat, milk and dairy products obviously, hide, hoof and horn, draught animals when we needed them; a few adjectives (bucolic, bovine, bullish), some similes and metaphors (strength of an ox, calf-love, silly cow, bullshit etc.); the subject matter of old Dutch paintings, sacred significance  in Hindu religion. 
 But we tend to forget they were the source of a crucial medical advance that led to the eradication of the dreadful contagious disease of smallpox that for thousands of years took countless lives and scarred others.  Vaccination is named after the Latin for cow. vacca. 

Until the end of the 18th century immunity to smallpox was conferred only by contracting and surviving the disease, often with terrible disfigurement. For hundreds of years  variolation had been used as a form of protection. This involved introducing some active smallpox material into the skin of a healthy person who would then develop a milder form of the disease. However the technique was not fail-safe, some people died of it or were not adequately immunised and the practise could  actually spread rather than control  the disease.

It was not until 1798 that Edward Jenner introduced the safer procedure of vaccination, drawing directly upon the fact that the famously creamy complexions of dairy maids were the result of the protection conferred upon them by contracting a minor skin infection from cows' udders early in their working lives. The smallpox immunity guaranteed by this cowpox was in fact already known by country people and had been used by Dorset farmer Benjamin Jesty to protect his own family 20 years earlier but it was Jenner who introduced cowpox vaccination to the wider world. 
"On 14 May 1796, Jenner tested his hypothesis by inoculating James Phipps, an eight-year-old boy who was the son of Jenner's gardener. He scraped pus from cowpox blisters on the hands of Sarah Nelmes, a milkmaid who had caught cowpox from a cow called Blossom" 

Vaccination, once accepted as safe and effective, was rapidly taken up* and offered free of charge, in Europe and across the wider world (and thereby hangs another tale that I might tell another time.)
Small pox was finally eradicated  from the human population in 1979 - although some active material remains in laboratories in the USA and Russia.

So I say: thank you, cows!


*A contemporary cartoon indicates that there were some popular anxieties about sprouting Blossom-like appendages as a result of vaccination.

Vaccination (the term is now used generally and not just for smallpox) is absolutely essential for disease prevention, not only for the protection of individuals but of populations at large. The news media currently report a drop in MMR vaccinations for 2 year-olds in the UK last year and many people are still worried by the criminal misinformation about it that was spread by one rogue doctor and pernicious newspaper stories.