1800-1918 Individuals- Medicine

Brought innoculation to Britian

She discovered that a health person could be immunised against smallpox using pus from the sores of a sufferer with a mild form of the disease

 However, inoculation sometimes led to smallpox and death

Jenner investigated and discovered people who had already had cowpox didn’t get smallpox.

In 1796 he took a small boy and injected him with pus from the sores of a milkmaid with cowpox. Jenner then injected James with smallpox. James didn’t catch the disease

Opposition:

• Jenner could not scientifically explain how it worked.
• Inoculators were afraid of losing money.
• Many were worried about side effects; they worried about giving themselves a disease that from cows.
• Some members of the Church believed that vaccination was not natural

Louis Pasteur’s Germ Theory – 1857

Louis Pasteur was employed in 1857 to find the explanation for the souring of sugar beet used in fermenting industrial alcohol. His answer was to blame germs in the air.

He proved there are germs in the air by sterilising water and keeping it in a flask that didn’t allow airborne particles to enter. 

Opposed the miasma theory= controversial

Went to Crimean war (1853 – 1856), made huge improvements in the death rate due to improvements in ward hygiene, death rate fell from 43% to 2%

When she returned home, she wrote a book ‘Notes on Nursing’ and sets up a hospital in London

Volunteered to help as a nurse in the Crimean War, she is rejected by Florence Nightingale because of her race

But goes anyway self-financing her journey (poor background)

mportant part in improving nursing care during the war

Not given much credit as she was a poor black woman from Jamacia, not allowed to work as a nurse in England after her return

Lost to France in 1870-71 war- spurred competition between him and Pasteur

Began the process of linking diseases to the microbe that caused them