The Boy in the Garden

Edward Jenner was a country doctor in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, who liked fossils, played violin in the local music club, and once launched a hydrogen balloon from a castle wall. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1788 for figuring out that newly-hatched cuckoos roll the host bird's eggs out of the nest using a small hollow on their backs that disappears at twelve days. He was, by 1796, mildly famous for birds.

Then he had an idea about cows.

On 14 May 1796, Jenner made two small cuts in the arm of his gardener's eight-year-old son, James Phipps, and rubbed in pus from a milkmaid's cowpox blister. The boy ran a fever and recovered. Six weeks later, to see if the protection held, Jenner inoculated him with live smallpox. Phipps did not get sick. So Jenner did it again. And again. Across years, on the same boy. What the gardener made of this is not recorded.

When the procedure worked, Jenner gave Phipps a rent-free cottage in Berkeley. He planted rose trees in front of it with his own hands.

In 1823, when Jenner died, Phipps walked behind the coffin.