Smallpox has been, for all practical purposes, eradicated! As recently as two hundred years ago, it was a scourge probably second only to the bubonic plague. At the end of the twentieth century, there were so few cases of either one, that each one becomes a media event.

We all owe thanks to Brother and Dr. Edward Jenner, born into the family of the vicar of Berkeley, Gloucestershire, England in 1749. He grew up to become one of the most beloved members of Royal Faith and Friendship Lodge No. 270 in Berkeley, serving as Worshipful Master in 1811-1813. He had been exalted in Hope and Sincerity Royal Arch Chapter No. 134 in 1805.

After being apprenticed to a physician in Bristol, Bro. and Dr. Jenner opened his own practice in Berkeley in 1773. Soon he observed that dairymaids who had had cowpox, could not become infected with smallpox. He began the studies which, by first proving that cowpox is a milder form of smallpox, led him to the idea of purposely infecting human subjects with cowpox, to see if that would render the subject immune to smallpox. Consider what a leap of the intellect that was! Consider also the plight of little James Phipps, eight years old in May 1796, and his family, who dared to have him receive the first "vaccination" (from the Latin vacca 'cow') of cowpox sore material, and then be injected with the dreaded smallpox a few weeks later! The discovery was announced in a thesis, written after more tests, in 1798.

Bro. and Dr. Jenner sent a book of instructions with the cowpox virus to the Five Iroquois Nations of North America. They sent him a wampum belt and a message saying that they would teach their children to revere his name until all generations would be gathered unto the Great Spirit. Bro. and Dr. Jenner valued the belt as highly as his membership as a Fellow of the Royal Society, and wore it even over his Masonic Apron.

Bro. and Dr. Jenner died in 1823, and in 1825 his lodge brothers raised a monument to him in Gloucester Cathedral. In commemoration of this 250th anniversary, the British Royal mail has issued a delightful stamp featuring a very fat Holstein cow with the silhouettes of Dr. Jenner vaccinating James Phipps as two of her black spots.