Benjamin Jesty

Benjamin Jesty (c. 1736 – 16 April 1816) was a farmer at Yetminster in Dorset, England, notable for his early experiment in inducing immunity against smallpox using cowpox.

The notion that those people infected with cowpox, a relatively mild disease, were subsequently protected against smallpox was not an uncommon observation with country folk in the late 18th century, but Jesty was one of the first to intentionally administer the less virulent virus. He was one of the six English, Danish and German people who reportedly administered cowpox to artificially induce immunity against smallpox from 1770 to 1791; only Jobst Bose of Göttingen, Germany with his 1769 inoculations pre-dated Jesty's work.

Unlike Edward Jenner, a medical doctor who is given broad credit for developing the smallpox vaccine in 1796, Jesty did not publicise his findings made some twenty years earlier in 1774.

Jesty was born in Yetminster, Dorset, and baptized there on 19 August 1736, the youngest of at least four sons of Robert Jesty, who was a butcher. Little else is known of his early life. In March 1770 he married Elizabeth Notley (1740–1824) in Longburton, four miles north-east of Yetminster. The couple lived at Upbury Farm, next to Yetminster churchyard, and the couple had four sons and three daughters.

During the eighteenth century smallpox was widespread throughout England, with frequent epidemics. It was known in the dairy-farming areas in the south-west of the country that the milkmaids and other workers who contracted cowpox from handling cows' udders, were afterwards immune to smallpox. Such people were able to nurse smallpox victims without fear of contracting the disease themselves. This folk-knowledge gradually became more widely disseminated amongst the medical community: in 1765 a Dr Fewster (possibly John Fewster) of Thornbury, Gloucestershire presented a paper to the Medical Society of London entitled "Cow pox and its ability to prevent smallpox", and Dr. Rolph, another Gloucestershire physician, stated that all experienced physicians of the time were aware of this.

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