Vaccine

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /vækˈsin/

Definitions

  1. A preparation that triggers an immune response to confer protection against specific infectious diseases and reduce their transmission risks
  2. A substance that elicits an immune reaction to help the body fight off infections by specific pathogens and enhance overall immunity
  3. A product containing weakened or inactive parts of a pathogen used to build immunity against diseases

Etymology: Every COVID shot, flu jab and polio drop carries the memory of one cow. Her name was Blossom, she lived in Gloucestershire, and her hide still hangs in the library of St George's medical school in London. In May 1796 the country doctor Edward Jenner took matter from a cowpox sore on the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a milkmaid who had caught the disease from Blossom. He scratched it into the arm of James Phipps, his gardener's eight-year-old son. Weeks later he exposed the boy to smallpox, and nothing happened. Country people had long noticed that milkmaids who caught cowpox seemed spared from smallpox. A Dorset farmer, Benjamin Jesty, had acted on that folk knowledge with his own family in 1774. Jenner was the one who tested it and published it. His 1798 report gave the disease a Latin name: "variolae vaccinae," roughly "the pox of cows." "Variolae," smallpox, comes from "varius," spotted. "Vaccinae" comes from "vaccinus," of a cow, built on "vacca," cow. English took up the adjective at once in "vaccine matter" and "vaccine inoculation." By 1800 the procedure had its own name, "vaccination," reportedly coined by the Plymouth surgeon Richard Dunning. The noun followed, partly shortened from the English adjective and partly borrowed from French "vaccine" and "vaccin," the cowpox material itself. For decades the word meant that and only that. The cow left the word in 1881. Louis Pasteur had been weakening the germs of chicken cholera and anthrax to protect animals against them. At the International Medical Congress in London that year, he proposed that "vaccination" stretch to cover every such preventive inoculation, in homage to Jenner. The profession agreed, and a word that once named a single bovine disease came to name the whole science. The cow survives across the Romance languages too, in Spanish "vacuna," Italian "vaccina" and Portuguese "vacina."

Synonyms: immunization, inoculation, serum, antigen, jab

Antonyms: infection, contagion, disease, virus, pathogen