Edward Jenner

Born into a clergyman’s family at Berkeley in Gloucestershire, England, he was apprenticed to a country surgeon from the age of thirteen and studied in London under the famous surgeon John Hunter before returning home to practise as a country doctor all his life. His study of the cuckoo’s habit of laying eggs in other birds’ nests won him election to the Royal Society. He took out no patent on vaccination but spread it freely, and the British Parliament awarded him large grants in recognition. He vaccinated the poor free of charge in a hut in his garden.