Meet Benjamin Jesty: The unsung hero of vaccinations
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">More than 250 years before the first case of COVID-19 was announced, another deadly virus - smallpox - was spreading across Europe.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The smallpox epidemic led to the development of the first vaccine, credited to Gloucestershire physician, Edward Jenner.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">However, the technique which Jenner became famous for had been pioneered more than 20 years earlier by a Dorset dairy farmer whose social status prevented him from receiving any credit.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It wasn’t until microbiologist Patrick Pead, who was holidaying in Dorset in 1985, found a booklet in a Worth Matravers village called ‘Benjamin Jesty: The First Vaccinator’.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“I thought ‘that’s not right, it was Edward Jenner’,” he said.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“We went to the churchyard and saw his tombstone and that day changed my life.”</span></p>
<p><img style="width: 500px; height: 307.37704918032784px;" src="https://oversixtydev.blob.core.windows.net/media/7842847/_119356027_561b6ee2-0976-4b53-ac10-2677da1907fa.jpg" alt="" data-udi="umb://media/806cca2aa4094d378377c4193b187d8e" /></p>
<p><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Image: Julia&keld / Find a Grave</span></em></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Over the following years, Pead went to work, piecing together what little information was known about Jesty. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This included the tracking down of the only portrait of the famer, which was believed lost for more than a century before it turned up on the other side of the world.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jesty’s story starts in 1774, when the farmer deliberately infected his family with cowpox to protect them from the smallpox virus, which was the leading cause of death at the time.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Most people became infected during their lifetimes, with about 30 percent of those infected not surviving.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">However, Jesty had contracted cowpox as a boy and knew that milkmaids seemed to somehow be immune from smallpox.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Using pus taken from lumps on a cow’s udder, he scratched the infectious material into the skin of his wife and two sons using a stocking needle.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Though his wife eventually recovered after being seriously ill, Jesty was vilified.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The last trial for witchcraft had been less than 40 years earlier,” Pead said.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Jesty was reviled, people were suspicious.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“In those days, everybody would go to church on Sunday and the human body was sacred but here was a guy taking something from a beast and poking it into a human body.”</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jesty’s experiments were later proved to be successful after attempts to infect his sons with smallpox failed, indicating they were immune.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Edward Jenner is believed to have heard of Jesty’s experiments through his dining club, carried out a similar test in 1796 on an eight-year-old boy, but his findings were rejected by The Royal Society.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">After additional experiments, and with support from his colleagues and the king, Jenner was awarded a total of </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">£</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">30,000 ($AUD 56,270 or $NZD 59,360) by parliament between 1802 and 1807.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But, Jesty’s efforts were not unrecognised, with doctors and clergy calling for his recognition in the discovery.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Despite their attempts to give him credit where it was due - including in the commission of Jesty’s portrait - Jenner’s well-connected supporters succeeded, leaving Jesty to become a footnote in the history of medicine.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In his quest to uncover more about Jesty, Mr Pead was able to locate the portrait - which had passed to the Pope family of the Eldridge Pope Brewery in Dorchester - after receiving the phone number of a Pope family descendent in South Africa.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“I rang them straight away - it was about 10 o’clock at night. They said, ‘it’s hanging here above the fireplace in the family home’,” he said.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">After a drawn-out process, the portrait returned to the UK and was restored over two years.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The painting finally went on display, first in Dorchester’s Dorset Museum, then at the Wellcome Collection galleries.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Interest in Jesty’s story has grown ever since, and Pead has written books and articles, given hundreds of talks, and was awarded a Fellowship of the Historical Association for his efforts.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“I’m a scientist working in medicine and I know all of the progress is built on the findings of others,” he said.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Vaccination wasn’t plucked out of the air by Benjamin Jesty or by Edward Jenner, it was built on out of what went before - that’s why Jesty does deserve recognition.”</span></p>
<p><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Image: Wellcome Collection</span></em></p>
