GCSE > History > AQA > GCSE History: Medicine and Health in Britain (1000-Present) Topic Summaries > Renaissance medicine > Renaissance public health
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Summary table
  • Renaissance public health measures were generally reactive rather than preventative and were limited by their continued reliance on miasma theory. One exception was the development of inoculation and later vaccination methods towards the end of the 1700s.
  • Inoculation works by giving healthy people a mild form of illness from an infected person, building up their resistance to the disease. It was already relatively popular in Asia during the 1500s.
  • In 1721, smallpox inoculation became popular in Britain after an aristocrat inoculated her children, having seen it done in Turkey.
  • Edward Jenner had heard theories that milkmaids who caught cowpox were protected against smallpox and tested this by injecting cowpox into an eight-year-old boy, then inoculating him with smallpox eight weeks later. The boy did not react to the inoculation, leading to Jenner’s discovery of vaccination (from the Latin word for cow, vacca).
  • However, Jenner could not explain why vaccination worked, making it difficult for others to accept it. Many doctors profited from inoculation so disliked Jenner’s new discovery even though it was safer.
  • Although others had made similar discoveries, Jenner was the first to use scientific testing methods. By 1853, Britain had made smallpox vaccination compulsory, and it was completely eradicated in 1980.

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