The joy I felt at the prospect before me of being the instrument destined to take away from the world one of its greatest calamities was so excessive that I sometimes found myself in a kind of reverie.
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"The most valuable possessions are those which we acquire by our own exertions."
"I shall not attempt to give a detail of all the cases that have come under my observation, but shall select a few of the most striking, and such as will, I trust, be sufficient to convince the candid …"
"I have always endeavoured to be guided by reason, and not by prejudice."
"The greatest reward for my labours is the satisfaction of having done good to my fellow creatures."
"This Inquiry will lay all those troublesome ghosts which have so long haunted the Metropolis with their ox-faces, & dismal hootings against Vaccination. However, tis all for the best – you may depend …"
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Jenner describes an overwhelming, almost dreamlike happiness at the realization that he might eliminate one of humanity's most devastating diseases. The emotion was so intense it pulled him out of ordinary conscious thought into a trancelike state of wonder. He understood he stood at a historic threshold — not just solving a medical problem, but potentially erasing mass human suffering from the world entirely.
Jenner spent decades observing that milkmaids who caught cowpox seemed immune to smallpox. His 1796 experiment inoculating James Phipps was the culmination of that obsession. This quote captures his genuine humanitarian drive — he ultimately gave away his vaccine freely rather than profiting, consistent with a man moved by mission rather than ambition.
Smallpox killed roughly 400,000 Europeans annually in the late 18th century and disfigured millions more. No effective treatment existed; variolation carried real death risk. In this context, Jenner's vision of total eradication was almost incomprehensible in its ambition — diseases were accepted as divine or natural inevitabilities, making his conviction that one could be eliminated genuinely revolutionary thinking.
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