Edward Jenner, F. R .S., 1749 - 1823

• Published in: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: The Royal Society 1949
• Subjects: Arctic; Jenner; Parry
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.1949.0003; https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsnr.1949.0003

EDWARD JENNER was born in the vicarage at Berkeley on the banks of the Severn on 17 May 1749* Fie was the third son of the Rev. Stephen Jenner, M.A., Rector of Rockhampton and Vicar of Berkeley, a clergyman of some means and much landed property in Gloucestershire and Worcester, tutor to a former Earl of Berkeley and a friend of that noble house. Jenner’s mother was the daughter of the Rev. Flenry Head, a member of an old and respectable Berkshire family. His elder brother, also in Holy Orders, looked after the small boy of five when the father died and no doubt encouraged a natural liking for country life and a taste for natural history. Before he was nine young Jenner is said to have made a collection of the nests of the doormouse. He was put to school at Wotton-under-Edge under a Mr Clissold and later was placed in the care of the Rev. Dr Washbourn at Cirencester from whom he received a sound classical education. About this time he became a lifelong friend of Caleb Hillier Parry (1755-1822) who shared his enthusiasm for fossils which abounded in the oolitic formation in that neighbourhood. Parry, too, has achieved fame as an original contributor to medicine, for in the course of a long professional career at Bath he published important studies on angina pectoris and the arterial pulse, and without doubt gave the first complete description of exophthalmic goitre many years before Graves and Basedow, although they are universally given the credit of that discovery. One of Parry’s sons, afterwards Rear-Admiral William Edward Parry, R.N., gained fame as an arctic explorer.