Britain’s miraculous, life-saving garden shed

An elegant period home hidden among trees next to the church in a quiet English village houses a little-known medical museum. More than 200 years ago, this whitewashed Queen Anne building was the home of a humble country doctor. With its simple collection of artefacts displayed in traditional glass cabinets, it sounds like a tourist attraction doomed to semi-obscurity.

But as Britain’s museums tentatively prepare to re-open after Covid restrictions, Dr Jenner’s House in Berkeley, on the edge of the Gloucestershire Cotswolds, is expected to face a massive influx of visitors.

That’s because this is where the science of vaccination began. You can step into the garden shed where Edward Jenner gave the world’s first vaccination to his gardener’s eight-year-old son in 1796. It’s the very crucible of the science that has helped in the global fight against Covid.

Before the pandemic, the house was ranked the village’s third most popular sight (after the medieval castle where Edward II was murdered and a family farm park). Post-Covid, it could become a major international attraction.

Visitors will be able to see the candle-lit study behind the staircase where Jenner’s scientific notes and drawings scratched out with an ivory dip pen sit on his round baize-covered desk. This is where he created the word “vaccine”. On the wall is a contemporary oil painting of Blossom the cow. She was so central to his experiments that Jenner used vacca, the Latin for “cow”, to describe what he had discovered: vaccination. Blossom, a large brown Gloucester dairy cow, was the source of the original infection of cowpox used to create the world’s first vaccines.

The story is heroic in simplicity. Village legend tells that Jenner was very concerned with local smallpox outbreaks. It was one of the most dangerous viruses humans have faced, with a death rate of around 30% and terrible permanent disfigurement of survivors. The churchyard alongside his garden houses graves of many contemporary victims.

It is said that a milkmaid told Jenner she wasn’t worried about catching smallpox – because she’d already caught the much milder “cowpox” from her cows. Local milkmaids knew that once you had cowpox you never got smallpox.

At the time, the medical profession was wrestling with emerging theories of inoculation. This simply involved injecting a dose of an actual disease, like a modern chickenpox party – where parents bring their toddlers together to deliberately pass the infection at an early age and infer immunity against later cases, which can have much more serious consequences. The early inoculators simply gave the full disease to patients when they were young and strong. They hopefully survived… and then would be immune.

Jenner was inspired by the milkmaid’s comments to devise a much better solution: a harmless but effective injection to confer immunity. He hypothesised that if he gave mild cowpox to people, it would stimulate some sort of internal safety system to protect people against smallpox. In an era of blood-letting leeches and purgatives of mercury, this was a revolutionary concept. No-one then knew about immune systems. In many ways, Jenner was centuries ahead of his time.

BBC