The Truth About the Discovery of the Smallpox Vaccine

Jenner didn’t discover that cowpox protected against smallpox, a simple Country Doctor did. The story appears in this week’s The New England Journal of Medicine:

Two hundred fifty years ago, an almost-forgotten country doctor made an observation while inoculating a group of farmers against smallpox. Although John Fewster never appreciated the importance of his discovery, he told his colleagues what he had found, setting in motion a process that led to the development of the smallpox vaccine and the eventual eradication of the virus. All immunizations arguably have their origins in this event.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1715349?query=featured_secondary

Hippocratic Fingers

Hippocrates continues to fascinate me. I wasn’t aware that he discovered the association between fingertip clubbing and lung disease. Here is a 2008 article about the actual mechanism behind the clinical sign:

Click to read Medics Solve an Ancient Riddle — and offer a new tool for diagnosis.

And in the latest issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, there is a picture of clubbing of the toes, but not of the fingers, in a patient with patent ductus arteriosus:

Click to read Differential Clubbing and Cyanosis.