Benjamin Jesty

Aged unknown

Benjamin Jesty (c. 1736 – 16 April 1816) was a farmer at Yetminster in Dorset, England, notable for his early experiment in inducing immunity against smallpox using cowpox. The notion that those people infected with cowpox, a relatively mild disease, were subsequently protected against smallpox was not an uncommon observation with country folk in the late 18th century, but Jesty was one of the first to intentionally administer the less virulent virus. He was one of the six English, Danish and German people who reportedly administered cowpox to artificially induce immunity against smallpox from 1770 to 1791; only Jobst Bose of Göttingen, Germany with his 1769 inoculations pre-dated Jesty's work. Unlike Edward Jenner, a medical doctor who is given broad credit for developing the smallpox vaccine in 1796, Jesty did not publicise his findings made some twenty years earlier in 1774.

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