Where Does the Word "Vaccine" Come From? (Moo)

Smallpox is a scary disease that can kill you, or at the very least, leave terrible scarring. You can think of it like super-chickenpox. You can imagine why physician Edward Jenner would have been excited to hear this rumor: Supposedly, milkmaids who had gotten cowpox never got smallpox.

This is exciting because cowpox is really not so bad. You might get a couple of painful rashes and have to stay in bed for a day or two, but you wouldn’t die. Jenner thought that cowpox might have some ability to protect you from every getting smallpox. Cool.

Jenner decided to test out this hypothesis. He found a local 8-year old boy and gave the boy cowpox. The boy got a little sick and then got better. Jenner then gave the boy smallpox…and thankfully, the boy didn’t get sick! Jenner repeated the experiment with a bunch of other people and got the same results, which he published in 1798.

This started the practice of exposing people to cowpox to prevent them from getting smallpox. Physicians would make people sick for a day or two, but as a result, many, many lives were saved from smallpox.

Luckily, as technology and science have improved, vaccination techniques have improved as well. We no longer need to make people a little sick sick in order to prevent them from getting very sick. We can give people immunity by exposing them to a harmless dead (most common) or weakened (rare, but in some vaccines) virus so they can avoid getting sick from the live virus. (We also don’t run experiments on various local kids. We go through a long and highly regulated process of controlled testing of vaccines on informed volunteers.)

And the word “vaccine”? It comes from the Latin word “vaccinae”, which means “cow”. Moo.

Source:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/vaccine-the-words-history-aint-pretty