History of Medicine

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

As the COVID-19 vaccine rollout gains traction and we finally seem to have overcome the supply crunch, we now face a new problem- vaccine hesitancy. Although the number of Americans who are hesitant to take the vaccine has steadily been dropping as the numbers of vaccinated people rise with little or no side effects, there are still about 40% of folks who are currently against or undecided about the vaccine. Few of them are staunch anti-vaxxers who protest any vaccine but the majority of these are people who are hesitant to take it due to the uncertainty about the new vaccine. Interestingly, vaccines have always met with skepticism beginning with the very first vaccine. In 1798, when Edward Jenner introduced the small pox vaccine, it was met with strong opposition and even caricatured in the press with grotesque illustrations of deformities including cow heads growing out of vaccinated people (because the vaccine was made from cow pox). An 1802 anti-small pox vaccination caricature In