Thank Blossom

In May 1796, an English country doctor named Edward Jenner took some fluid from a cowpox sore on the hand of a milkmaid, Sarah Nelmes. She’d caught it from a cow called Blossom. Jenner scratched the fluid into the arm of an eight-year-old boy, James Phipps. A few weeks later, he exposed the boy to smallpox.

James didn’t get sick.

Country people had long believed that milkmaids who caught mild cowpox didn’t catch smallpox, which killed and disfigured millions. At least one farmer had already tested the idea on his own family. Jenner’s contribution was to experiment, write it all down and publish. In 1798 he described his work with variolae vaccinae, Latin for “cow pox”, from vacca, cow.

By 1800 the procedure had a name: vaccination. Literally, “cowing”.

Not everyone was impressed. In 1802 the cartoonist James Gillray drew a famous print of Jenner’s patients sprouting little cows from their arms and faces. The fear that a medical treatment might turn you into something else is older than social media.

For most of the 1800s, vaccination meant one thing only: protection against smallpox using cowpox. Then Louis Pasteur developed protection against other diseases, including chicken cholera, anthrax and rabies. He proposed calling them all vaccines, in honour of Jenner. The Oxford English Dictionary credits the broader use to him.

So every vaccine you’ve ever had, for flu, tetanus, measles or COVID, carries the name of a cow. Most of them have nothing to do with cattle. The word stuck because the first success named the whole category.

That happens more often than you’d think. The first version of something tends to name everything that follows. We google on any search engine. We hoover with any vacuum cleaner. Australians Esky their drinks whatever the brand. The pioneer gets the noun, and the competitors get to live inside it.

It’s a reminder for anyone launching something new. The first clear name for an idea is extraordinarily sticky. If you name the category, you own the conversation for generations. If someone else names it, you’ll spend your marketing budget explaining how you’re different from them.

Jenner didn’t set out to name a branch of medicine. He just described what he did, precisely, with the word that fitted. Two centuries later, a cow called Blossom is still in every clinic.