Edward Jenner is still lauded as the inventor of vaccines. Whether he was or not, one is not to know. The idea allegedly came back from Istanbul (formerly Constantinople) with Lady Montagu about 150 years earlier.
Anyway the little boy in the illustration below is James Phipps an eight-year-old boy who was the son of Jenner's gardener. Coerced? I think so.
Jenner had his own seven year old son he could have experimented on.
Here’s Jonas Salk administering one of his polio vaccines to a willing young recipient in the 1950s.
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