The discovery of vaccine is a milestone in the history of human development. In 1796, Edward Jenner (1749-1823), a British doctor, inoculated the liquid in the blisters on the skin of a girl who was suffering from vaccinia to an 8-year-old healthy boy, which was the most adventurous experiment in the history of medicine, and the first vaccine in the world was born. Jenner was also praised as the "father of immunology" by later generations.
when jenner was a young medical intern, he began to think about something he heard from a rural milkmaid. The woman worker thinks that she never worries about smallpox because she has been infected with cowpox once. Vaccinia is an extremely mild disease, which is very common. It is transferred from the breasts of dairy cows to the hands of female milking workers, causing small pustules and rashes. Vaccinia is similar to smallpox, but it is much milder. In Gloucestershire, England, where Jenner is a rural doctor, it is common knowledge that vaccinia can cause immunity to smallpox.
As we all know, if a person survives a mild smallpox, he or she will be immune to the next infection. In fact, some doctors have grafted this mild disease on a few rich people to protect them from the smallpox pandemic that swept Europe in the 18th century. Vaccination is expensive, and its risk is almost the same as the disease itself. The vaccination process can sometimes even be fatal, and it often leaves ugly scars on patients.
jenner spent almost 2 years studying this problem and made detailed records of patients with vaccinia and smallpox. Finally, in May 1796, he did an experiment. He got the vaccinia pus from the infected milkmaid and inoculated it on an 8-year-old child James Phipps. As Jenner expected, the child contracted mild vaccinia, but as Jenner hoped, he recovered quickly. Go to the next step in two months. At this time, Jenna inoculated the child with a deadly dose of smallpox. This is a very dangerous and controversial experiment, but the child has always been healthy, and there is no sign that he is infected with this deadly disease. A few months later, Jenner repeated his experiment and injected young phipps with another strong dose of smallpox slurry. The child is still healthy.
Jenner concludes that vaccinia virus is very similar to smallpox, so the body can be resistant to both at the same time, but the symptoms of vaccinia are very mild, which will only cause slight discomfort after vaccination.
jenner published his findings. Despite initial suspicion and resistance, vaccination was fully accepted in Britain in 18 and was soon adopted by the rest of the world. It is worth mentioning that Jenner himself vaccinates more than 3 poor people every day in the courtyard of his hometown. By 18, it was estimated that 1, people had acquired new immunity, and many countries soon implemented compulsory vaccination. After that, the incidence of smallpox dropped sharply.
jenner's experiment was successful, and the world's first effective vaccine was born. But at that time, no one knew exactly why smallpox vaccine was effective, or what caused this or that disease. Although it was later found that smallpox vaccination was not effective for life, it must be "reactivated" or "enhanced" in the future. However, Jenner's measures not only freed the world from a terrible disease, but also established the science of immunology, and also opened a channel for future generations' research, prompting later scientists Pasteur and others to seek treatment and immunization methods for other diseases.
in p>1885, Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), a French microbiologist and academician of the French Academy, gave Joseph Meister, a 9-year-old boy who was bitten by a rabid dog, the first dose of rabies vaccine. One month later, the boy recovered. Pasteur became the first person in the world who could save his life from rabies. To commemorate his great contribution to the fight against rabies, the United Nations designated the anniversary of Pasteur's death and September 28th every year as World Rabies Day.
As the founder of bacterial theory, the advocate of pasteurization in food disinfection and the inventor of rabies vaccine, Pasteur's name is a household name.
The "germ theory" put forward by him in the 196s was a major breakthrough in the history of life science. From then on, it was confirmed that tiny organisms were the vectors causing infectious diseases, which enabled many people engaged in public health to find a solution to the problem.
in the 199s, several kinds of bacteria were identified and determined to be related to certain diseases and infectious diseases, and new methods were found to eliminate them or at least control their spread, which were introduced into hospitals and surgical operations. But there are still some diseases that are still difficult to explain and seem to be more difficult to deal with. Rabies is one of them. Pasteur speculated that perhaps the organisms involved were so small that it was difficult to see them even through a microscope. Later research proved Pasteur's conjecture that viruses are also the cause of diseases. )
Pasteur had three children who died of infectious diseases (typhoid fever), which made him miserable, which inspired him to study the methods to cure various deadly infectious diseases. Later, he found that rabies had the highest mortality rate. In order to challenge this problem, Pasteur began to study ways to deal with rabies.
Pasteur thinks that the microorganisms of infectious diseases can reduce their virulence under special culture and become vaccines to prevent diseases. Therefore, he boldly collected saliva from a five-year-old rabies patient and diluted it and injected it into rabbits. Rabbits became ill and died one after another. Pasteur then collected the saliva of these dead rabbits, diluted it and injected it into other healthy rabbits, all of which died without exception. After repeating the experiment for more than 1 times, Pasteur suspected that this disease of people and animals was acting on the nervous system. So he opened the skull of the sick rabbit, extracted the pathogenic bacteria and cultured them, diluted them into different concentrations and continued to test them for rabbits.
The dog recovered after 28 days until it was injected with the "weakest pathogen solution". After a while, the dog was injected with "the most toxic germ liquid", and the dog successfully survived.
Pasteur concluded that rabies virus should be concentrated in the nervous system, so he boldly took out a small piece of spinal cord from the dead rabbit and hung it in a sterile flask to make it "dry". The dried spinal cord and distilled water were mixed and injected into dogs, and all dogs survived magically. (As we know today, this is an attenuated live vaccine)
The survival of this dog has strengthened the belief in the development of Pasteur vaccine. He believes that the vaccine made by extracting the spinal cord from the patient, drying it in a completely sterilized bottle, taking it out after 14 days, grinding it and adding water can be used in the human body. On July 6, 1885, the appearance of Joseph Meister, a boy infected with rabies, was not only the beginning of Joseph's hope, but also the beginning of the success of Pasteur's experiment.
Compared with the modern cell culture vaccine, the live attenuated rabies vaccine invented by Pasteur more than 1 years ago and cultured with animal brain tissue has serious defects in safety and effectiveness. According to the quality standard of modern rabies vaccine, all of Pasteur's rabies vaccines were unqualified products. However, the rabies vaccine invented by Pasteur did more harm than good in that year, which laid the foundation for the development of a series of other modern vaccines and opened a new era for human beings to prevent and treat infectious diseases. After many updates and the efforts of countless researchers, it has developed into a modern inactivated rabies vaccine cultured in cells.
In p>1887, the Pasteur Institute was established in Paris. Today, the cutting-edge Pasteur Institute has been distributed in 32 research institutions in 29 countries around the world, and eight Nobel Prize winners in physiology and medicine have studied and worked in Pasteur Institute. Just as Pasteur expected when he founded the institute, "Our institute will become a treatment center for rabies, a research center for infectious diseases and a training center", Pasteur's beautiful vision has now been realized.