Edward Jenner (1749–1823) was the English country doctor who invented vaccination: on May 14, 1796, he inoculated 8-year-old James Phipps with cowpox and proved it protected against smallpox — launching the two-century campaign that eradicated the disease worldwide in 1980.
A country doctor in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, he had heard milkmaids say they would never get smallpox because they had caught the milder cowpox. He turned folk wisdom into tested science, publishing his results in 1798.
