How a day out in a Dorset village led us to finding out about the renowned 18th-century farmer and pioneer of inoculation, Benjamin Jesty.
as our lockdown woes began to ease recently, we decided to go out for a day trip to the Dorset countryside.
We’d been recommended to go to Worth Matravers, a few miles outside of Corfe on the way to Swanage. It was a glorious day and because some restrictions were still in place we were able to park in the charming village without any bother.
The village itself looks probably much the same as it did back in the 17th & 18th centuries, with the small cottages built from local stone. In fact, any new dwellings still have to be built from the same stone.
As we took in the village, I saw St Nicholas Church and made my way in to take a few photos. To the far side of the church and not visible from the road were two very well-tended gravestones. Thinking they must be the graves of recently deceased local dignitaries, I looked closer and found they were the graves of Benjamin Jesty and his wife Elizabeth, both of whom had died in the early 19th century.
Who was Benjamin Jesty?
Benjamin Jesty was a farmer from Yetminster in Dorset, born in 1736. He married Elizabeth and together they had four sons.
What made Jesty remarkable was that at the time he was alive, smallpox was rife throughout Europe and frequently resulted in epidemics ( over 400,000 deaths annually). It became apparent that milkmaids and others who worked with cows and had contracted cowpox were able to nurse those suffering from smallpox without the danger of contracting the killer disease.
Jesty and two of his servants had already had cowpox and so were immune and when a smallpox outbreak occurred in Yetminster in 1774, Jesty had the bright idea of inoculating his wife and his two eldest sons.
Bearing in mind that Jesty was by no means a medical man, but had the idea that if he could introduce the disease into his family deliberately, they would be immune. And so, using a darning needle he transferred cowpox into his wife and children by scratching their arms. Thankfully, although his wife suffered quite a severe reaction, they all survived.
Was Jesty hailed as a hero?
You would think that after such a significant medical breakthough, Jesty would be lauded wherever he went. But this was the 18th century and instead he was reviled because people thought that introducing animal diseases into man would lead to some sort of metamorphosis into that animal.
Edward Jenner takes the credit
In 1802, some 20 years after Jesty’s pioneering work, physician Edward Jenner received a reward from the House of Commons of £10,000 ( equivalent to £1 million today) for his work on vaccines and a further £20,000 five years later. Physician George Pearson was familiar with Jesty’s earlier work and tried to get parliament to give him recognition but although Jesty’s case was well-documented he failed to petition in person and so the case was disregarded.
However, all was not lost because another physician and reverend, Dr Andrew Bell of Swanage, prepared a paper proposing Jesty as the first vaccinator and Jesty was invited along with his son to London to give their version of events before a panel of medical officers at the ‘Original Pock Institute’.
After cross-examination and inoculating his son again with smallpox, Jesty was awarded with a pair of gold mounted lancets and the results of the examination were published in the ‘Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal’.
Jesty was a country farmer who had realised there may be a link between immunity to one disease and the contraction of another. I don’t think he ever sought fame or riches and as if to illustrate this, when he was invited to London and his family tried to persuade him to dress in a more up-to-date fashion, he said he didn’t see why he should dress better in London than in the country.
It seems a shame that Jesty didn’t get the recognition, ( or the £10,000) that he so thoroughly deserved for most of his life, but at least now there is a permanent memorial in a Dorest graveyard to his intuition and bravery.