He Tested His Vaccine On a Child. It Saved 300 Million Lives. #shorts

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Late 1700s, smallpox kills roughly 400,000 Europeans every year. One in seven children never survive it.

[00:00:08]Survivors are often blinded, scarred for life. There is no treatment. Edward Jenner is a country doctor in Gloucestershire. For years he's been hearing the same folk wisdom. Milkmaids who catch cowpox from cattle don't get smallpox. May 14th, 1796.

[00:00:25]He scrapes pus from cowpox lesions on the hands of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes and scratches it into the arm of an 8-year-old boy named James Phipps.

[00:00:35]The boy gets mildly ill from the cowpox.

[00:00:37]Then he recovers.

[00:00:39]Six weeks later, Jenner deliberately exposes James Phipps to live smallpox.

[00:00:44]The boy doesn't get sick.

[00:00:46]Jenner names the method vaccination from vacca, the Latin word for cow.

[00:00:52]The vaccine spreads across the globe.

[00:00:54]Smallpox kills an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century alone.

[00:00:59]But the numbers are falling. The last natural case is recorded in Somalia in 1977.

[00:01:05]The WHO declares smallpox eradicated in 1980. The only human disease ever wiped from the earth. It started with Jenner, a milkmaid, and a child. If this is your first Chronicle drop, hit subscribe. New history drops every day.