Surgeon, country doctor, pioneer naturalist, Edward Jenner was a giant in eighteenth-century science. When he discovered a vaccine for smallpox, he rescued mankind from one of history's most terrible scourges.

Jenner was apprenticed to a doctor at the age of thirteen, and a few years later studied with the famed surgeon John Hunter in London. There, with access to hospitals and laboratories, he developed great skills as a physician and a researcher. The future offered three alternatives -- to remain in London and become wealthy in private practice; to voyage around the world with explorer Captain Cook as naturalist-surgeon; or to return home as a country doctor. But neither money nor adventure could dissuade Jenner from his dream. He was determined to find a preventative for smallpox, and he felt that the answer lay in his own Gloucestershire dairy lands. There he could investigate a possibility that had intrigued him -- the connection between cowpox, a mild disease transmitted from cows to humans, and the ravaging smallpox that killed sixty million Europeans in his own century, that blinded, deafened and disfigured countless others.

After years of discouraging research, destiny brought together Edward Jenner, a milkmaid and an eight-year-old farm boy. These three participated in a scientific experiment that forever changed the course of history. Jenner proved that injecting humans with cowpox immunized them from smallpox.

He lived to hear his vaccine praised as a savior of mankind, and his method of vaccination paved the way for the work of men like Pasteur and Salk. President Thomas Jefferson wrote to Jenner: "Medicine has never before produced any single improvement of such utility . . . .You have erased from the calendar of human afflictions one of its greatest . . . Mankind can never forget that you have lived."

From the dust jacket