The first vaccine

Is there an inoculation against RFK Junior?

It was on this day in 1796 that the doctor Edward Jenner inoculated an eight-year-old boy with a vaccine for smallpox, the first safe vaccine ever developed.

Jenner was a country doctor and surgeon in the small town of Berkley, England, where he had lived for most of his life. The only time he’d ever been away from Berkley was when he studied for a few years at a hospital in London. It was there that he learned the basics of the scientific method, experimentation and careful observation. The job of a country doctor involved a fairly rudimentary treatment of injuries and illness, but Jenner thought he might be able to put the scientific method to some good use.

The most devastating disease in the world at the time was smallpox, a disease that caused boils to break out all over the body. It killed about one in every four adults who caught it, and one in every three children, and it was so contagious that most human beings in populous areas caught it at some point in their lives. During the 18th century alone, it killed about 60 million people.

In the mid-1700s, British doctors had imported a procedure from Asia in which healthy people were deliberately infected with smallpox through the skin, which brought on a milder form of the disease and then immunity. The procedure was called “inoculation,” after the horticultural term. Inoculation wasn’t practical, because inoculated patients could pass the disease onto others while they were showing symptoms, and some inoculated patients developed the more severe form of the disease and died.

Jenner wanted to develop a smallpox inoculation that wouldn’t harm anyone. He worked in a place with a lot of dairy farmers, and there was a rumor that milkmaids almost never caught smallpox. Jenner realized that the milkmaids had all suffered from a disease called cowpox, which they’d caught from the udders of cows. Jenner had a hunch that the infection of cowpox somehow helped the milkmaids develop immunity to smallpox.

Jenner decided to take some of the fluid from a cowpox sore and inject in into a healthy patient. There were no laws governing medical experimentation on human subjects at the time, but Jenner still had some reservations about trying his ideas out on a person. He mulled it over for years, and then finally decided to go ahead. On this day in 1796, he gathered some cowpox material from an infected milkmaid’s hand and injected it into the arm of an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps.

The boy developed a slight headache, and lost his appetite, but that was all. Six weeks later, Jenner inoculated the boy with smallpox, and the boy showed no symptoms. He had developed immunity from the cowpox.

Jenner submitted a paper about his new procedure to the prestigious Royal Society of London, but it was rejected. The president of the Society told Jenner that it was a mistake to risk his reputation by publishing something so controversial.

So Jenner published his ideas at his own expense in a 75-page book, which came out in 1798. The book was a sensation. The novelist Jane Austen noted in one of her letters that she’d been at a dinner party and everyone was talking about the “Jenner pamphlet.” The procedure eventually caught on, and it was called a “vaccine” after the Latin word for cow. It wasn’t perfect at first, because of poor sanitation and dirty needles, but it was the first time anyone had successfully prevented the infection of any contagious disease.

What made it so remarkable was that Jenner accomplished this before the causes of disease were even understood. It would be decades before anyone even knew about the existence of germs.

https://www.writersalmanac.org/index.html%3Fp=6018.html

Gaia

“In the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, bacteria were largely portrayed as infectious and unhealthy. (The idea that you should aspire to and can achieve a germ-free body and environment is still mobilized to sell products from shirts to soaps.) Lynn Margulis saw it differently, and, after viewing the TV show Star Trek, commented acerbically that she “was struck by its silliness. The lack of plants, the machinate landscape, and in the starship, the lack of all nonhuman life-forms seemed bizarre. Humans, if someday they trek in giant spaceships to other planets, will not be alone. In space as on earth, the elements of life, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus and a few others, must recycle. This recycling is no suburban luxury; it is a principle of life from which no technology can deliver us.” Having contributed hugely to how we would understand life in its smallest unit, the cell, she went on to theorize life in its largest expression, collaborating with James Lovelock on the Gaia hypothesis that the planet Earth can be understood as a single self-regulating system. Lovelock, she writes in her book Symbiotic Planet, “pointed out that our planetary environment is homeostatic. Just as our bodies, like those of all mammals, maintain a relatively stable internal temperature despite changing conditions, the earth system keeps its temperature and atmospheric composition stable.” That is, the earth is a grand self-regulating system that modulates the gases in the atmosphere to stabilize temperatures—until human beings in the industrial age emitted so much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that we destabilized the climate. Because of some of Lovelock’s early language and his use of the earth goddess Gaia’s name, his theory was sometimes disparaged on the grounds he’d said the planet was alive. What he had really said was that it was a system sustained and stabilized by the whole of living organisms and inorganic systems. The stories we tell about what nature is are the stories we tell about who we are or should be. Nature is treated as a touchstone for what is genuine; natural used as a term for what is authentic, legitimate, proper. This is often twisted…” — The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit https://a.co/00o1T4TN

I Am An American Philosopher: Phil Oliver – Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-interview-series/i-am-an-american-philosopher-phil-oliver/

Stop Worrying, and Let A.I. Help Save Your Life

…I am not arguing that we shouldn't aspire to perfection, nor that A.I. in health care should receive a free pass from regulators. A.I. designed to act autonomously, without clinician supervision, should be closely vetted for accuracy. The same goes for A.I. that may be integrated into machines like CT scanners, insulin pumps and surgical robots — areas in which a mistake can be catastrophic and a physician's ability to validate the results is limited. We need to ensure patients are fully informed and can consent to A.I. developers' intended use of their personal information. For patient-facing A.I. tools in high-stakes settings such as diagnosis and psychotherapy, we also need sensible regulations to ensure accuracy and effectiveness.

But as the saying goes, "Don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative." In health care, the alternative is a system that fails too many patients, costs too much and frustrates everyone it touches. A.I. won't fix all of that, but it's already fixing some of it — and that's worth celebrating.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/opinion/ai-health-medical-care.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Eat your ice cream, build your relationships…

And don't be a schmuck.

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/dr-ezekiel-emanuel-eat-ice-cream-and-other-tips-for-a-long-and-healthy-life/