Jenner and "different strokes for different folks"

Musing today, as I walked down my street, of the greatest accomplishments of the human race, it seems to me that respect for the ideas of others has led to more relief of suffering than any other single idea of mankind.

To wit, think of Ed Jenner, country doctor in England who was advised by an illiterate milk maid that she and her colleagues were not bothered by any Small Pox epidemic because they had had Cow Pox on their hands and it protected them from Small Pox. Milk Maids had been reporting this for decades and were taken seriously only a handful of times but never by a physician champion.
A Dr. Fewster, wrote a paper, "Cowpox and its ability to prevent small pox" which he sent to The London Medical Society in 1765 but according to what i can find he was not convinced of the benefits of vaccination and let the idea drop. This was several decades before Jenner popularized his vaccine. Maybe he felt the heat from colleagues and backed off out of fear of damage to his reputation.
English doctors scoffed at such outrageous blather from common milk maids. In fact this "old wives tale" was common knowledge at the time but was not pursued by the medical establishment because it was not "conventional wisdom" and the very idea of injecting pus which had come from infections of horses and cows was considered anathema. I suspect that any doctor who would resort to the use of Cow Pox material would be shunned by all his colleagues and branded a quack.
As a result, for decades this monumental observation was largely ignored.

But Jenner must have learned the lesson of "different strokes" because he pricked up his ears when he heard the milk maid's claim and went to work on obtaining Cow Pox material from milk maids and honed a technique for infecting healthy folks with this infectious agent. Jenner submitted his original work to the medical establishment to present this method he called vaccination to his colleagues and publish the information but the establishment rejected his initial report. However, he continued his work adding more cases and then inoculating those vaccinated patients with actual Small Pox material to which he found they were immune.
Pilloried by the medical establishment, he persisted. Mainstream medicine was extremely intolerant of different ideas where then as now "conventional wisdom" prevails.

But Jenner soldiered on with the vaccine because he was tolerant of new ideas from anyone, even a lowly milk maid. He marched to the beat of a different drummer and heard things that others did not hear.
Jenner's sentinel contribution was not the discovery of Cow Pox vaccination but doing clinical study on real patients and proving that vaccination could be done reliably and that when such patients were challenged with Small Pox they were immune. Then persisting in having this information heard and reported in the medical literature.

I heard Dr. Michael DeBakey the famous cardiovascular surgeon once explain that recognition of a discovery did not go to the first person to perform the procedure, but to the person who first performed the procedure successfully and clearly reported the results in a convincing manner.

I see tolerance well developed in Native American culture where they live and let live much more so than other cultures. They discriminate against nobody so long as they do no harm to the tribe. The only immorality is to cause suffering to the tribe. Actions that help the tribe are moral. And they have survived for thousands of years using this philosophy.

This respect for other differing opinions from any quarter made all the difference and led to one of the greatest medical miracles the world has ever known.

What an incredible lesson to learn. The idea of tolerance would make the planet so much richer and a much better place to live.

If Jenner's lesson to always question conventional wisdom and to respect and consider new ideas were put into widespread practice, progress in improving our lives would be much more rapid and we would all be happier for it.
Without those brave souls who think for themselves and challenge the status quo nothing would change and we would forever be stuck in the Dark Ages, still thinking that the earth was the center of solar system and burning different folks for speaking of things they saw that others didn't.
Consider the bison in the header, who decided to leave the trails and take the blacktop road. He marched alone and fortunately no one bothered him while he explored a new method of travel. But actually after a while walking on this hard black top road he moved back over to the usual bison trails, I guess because his feet felt better on the trail.
But I applaud him for trying something new and different. One day maybe he'll make a discovery because he marches to his own beat.

Uncle Steve