It's the Birthday today of a Chipping Sodbuy Man Who Changed the World

Tues Jan. 26th is the day Edward Jenner died in 1823 . His name is up among the greats such as Alexander Fleming who discovered Penicillin. Jenner's great gift to the world was the invention of vaccinations.

Jenner was a country doctor who had studied nature and his natural surrounding since a boy. Interestingly he is the first person to observe that cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds' nests, instead of making their own.

 Milkmaids of that era did not contract the deadly smallpox, but only a very mild form of the disease call cowpox. When they had had cowpox they were then somehow immune to smallpox.

Jenner did an experiment in which he took the pus of cowpox blisters from a milkmaid called Sarah who had caught it from a cow called Blossom, and injected it into a young boy called James. He then injected the boy with smallpox. Although the boy became ill he made a full recovery after a few days.

Jenner had made a discovery that changed the world, and could have become very rich by patenting it. Instead Jenner gave his invention free to the world. The word vaccination comes from the Latin 'vacca' which means cow in remembrance of Blossom the cow and Sarah the milkmaid.

2010 is a special year as it is thirty years since the eradication of smallpox world-wide, and there is going to be a stamp coming out in February commemorating Jenner's achievement.

Jenner spent part of his life in the Georgian House Chipping Sodbury which is now an Indian restaurant. The vaccine was invented while he lived in Berkeley in a house called the Chantry visit: www.jennermuseum.com to find out details of special events planned this year. There is also a petition to sign to reinstate Jenner's statue to its original site in Trafalgar Square. The Chantry is to be featured in an episode of the serial Most Haunted on TV during 2010.