Even though the process of vaccination can be traced back to ancient Indian and Chinese civilizations (as I wrote in my earlier post on history of vaccines), the name, like so many other words in the English language, has a Latin root.
Vaccine is derived from the Latin vaccinus, which means "of or belonging to cows". The first western vaccine was developed by English physician Edward Jenner using cow pox, which was called vaccinae. Jenner found that an injection of material taken from cowpox sores protected a person from getting small pox in the future. Because it was taken from cows (vacca in Latin), it came to be called vaccinus, which led to the adjective, vaccinae, and then to vaccine in English.
Cowpox virus |
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