In a Yetminster farmhouse, Benjamin Jesty pioneered vaccination decades before Edward Jenner claimed the breakthrough
Image: Barry Cuff Collection
Stand in Yetminster today and it is hard to imagine that one of the most important breakthroughs in medical history began here, in a farmhouse called Upbury.
Edward Jenner is usually credited as the pioneer of vaccination. But more than 20 years before Jenner’s famous experiment – and almost 250 years before COVID vaccines – a North Dorset farmer named Benjamin Jesty carried out a bold medical trial on his own family.
In the late 18th century, smallpox was sweeping through the county. It was a brutal disease, leaving survivors scarred and often blind, and claiming many lives. Inoculation already existed, but it involved deliberately infecting someone with smallpox itself – a practice known as variolation. It could offer protection … but it also carried real risk.
As a farmer, Jesty knew of the rural belief that people who’d had contact with cows that had cowpox were immune to the virus’s more serious cousin smallpox. Dairy workers who had caught cowpox – a much milder disease contracted from infected cows – seemed immune to smallpox. His own dairymaids, Anne Notley and Mary Reade, had both suffered cowpox through milking infected cows and later nursed relatives with smallpox without falling ill themselves.
When the smallpox epidemic broke out in North Dorset in 1774, Jesty was faced with the threat to his wife Elizabeth and their young children. He made a decision that was as simple as it was radical: use cowpox instead of smallpox. He travelled to Chetnole, where he knew William Elford had some cows with the marks of cowpox on their udders.
Jesty then used a stocking needle to take a tiny sample of pus from an udder and insert it into the arm of his wife, Elizabeth.
He then repeated the procedure with sons Robert and Benjamin, then aged three and two respectively, but omitted baby Betty.
The children experienced only mild symptoms. Elizabeth developed a fever and was treated by Dr Trowbridge of Cerne Abbas – who viewed the whole business with some scepticism. She recovered fully. None of the three ever contracted smallpox, even when later exposed to it through inoculation. Jesty’s fellow villagers proved seriously unsympathetic. Suspicious of anything that challenged their existing beliefs, and mindful of biblical warnings against contaminating the body with animal matter, villagers subjected him to physical and verbal abuse.
Despite this, the Jestys continued living in their Yetminster farmhouse until 1796, when they moved to Downshay Manor, Harmans Cross, near Swanage, which offered more land and more space for a family that now included seven children.
Coincidentally, 1796 was also the year that Jenner administered his first experimental cowpox vaccination on eight-year-old James Phipps at Berkeley, Gloucestershire. Because he was a village doctor, Jenner was better placed than Jesty to put the method on the medical map.
He also coined the phrase variolae vaccinae – meaning ‘vaccine of the cow’ – the origin of the word ‘vaccine’ that we use today.
Jesty, meanwhile, continued vaccinating people in his new parish, where his method was better received than at Yetminster.
Jesty’s earlier experiment might have slipped into obscurity had it not been for a Swanage clergyman, the Rev Andrew Bell, who campaigned for some recognition for a man ‘so often forgotten by those who have heard of Dr Jenner’. In 1805 Jesty was invited to London to appear before the Vaccine Pock Institution. He and his son Robert were tested with live smallpox and proved immune. The Institution praised his ‘superior strength of mind’ in the face of ‘prevailing popular prejudices’ and presented him with a testimonial, gold-mounted lancets and a portrait by Michael Sharp.
Even Jenner later acknowledged Jesty’s work as ‘corroborative evidence’.
Benjamin Jesty died in 1816 aged 79. His gravestone at Worth Matravers describes him as the ‘first person (known) that introduced the cowpox by inoculation’. Elizabeth lived to 84. Their sons died in their sixties.
Today, Yetminster marks its most famous resident with a blue plaque. The village looks much as it always has, but from this corner of North Dorset came an idea that would go on to transform global medicine: that immunity could be achieved not by courting the full force of a deadly disease, but by harnessing its gentler cousin.
History tends to remember the man whose science was published. But the experiment that helped change the world began here in a Dorset farmhouse – with a stocking needle, a cow and a farmer prepared to trust his own reasoning.
- Adapted from Farmer Jesty’s Quantum Leap
by Roger Guttridge, Feb 2021, The BV.
