Feature Article: Ben Franklin — Pro-vaccine Before Vaccines Were Invented?

This month’s edition of the Parents PACK newsletter was inspired by Dr. Paul Offit’s receipt of the 2016 Benjamin Franklin Founder Award. Dr. Offit is the director of the Vaccine Education Center. Award recipients are chosen for their significant accomplishments in a field of Franklin’s interest; this year’s focus was public health. We hope that after reading about several of Dr. Franklin’s contributions, you will be inspired to share ways that you have made or are currently making your community a better place for all. Use #BeLikeBen on social media to share your contributions — large or small.

Last month marked the 310th birthday of Dr. Benjamin Franklin. Dr. Franklin is well known for his historic role as a founding father and diplomat as well as for his accomplishments as a statesman, author, politician, scientist, inventor and activist.

Among his many contributions to colonial American society, Dr. Franklin was an avid supporter of a collective focus on public health and safety. He helped establish the nation’s first public hospital, Pennsylvania Hospital, and contributed to a variety of medical discoveries (see Did You Know section). As a public health activist, Dr. Franklin is remembered as an avid supporter of smallpox inoculation in the 1730s. At that time, protection from smallpox was afforded by a process known as variolation. Variolation involved taking pus from a smallpox pustule of an infected person and either injecting it into a non-immune person or drying it for later inhalation as a powder by a non-immune person. While the process would typically cause a mild form of the illness, it also produced lifelong immunity.

Sadly, Franklin’s support of inoculation through variolation was fueled in large part by the death of his 4-year-old son, Francis, following infection with smallpox. In his autobiography, Franklin wrote:

“In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it, my example showing that the regret may be the same either way and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.”

To many, purposeful infection through variolation was unacceptable; but, as was his talent in proscribing enlightened and nuanced thought to traditional thinking, Franklin educated himself on the matter and came to see the process as groundbreaking. He used his correspondence with doctors, civic leaders and politicians in colonial America and Europe to promote the practice and co-authored a manual, Some Account of the Success of Inoculation for the Small-Pox in England and America: Together with Plain Instructions, which was published and distributed in England and America in 1759.

Franklin died six years before Edward Jenner invented the smallpox vaccine — the world’s first vaccine — and nearly 200 years before the eradication of smallpox. Franklin’s and others’ experience with smallpox can be a reminder of not only the threat posed by infectious diseases, but also the realization that all parents worry about the best ways to protect their children. The difference is that some of the greatest concerns of yesteryear no longer commonly occupy the minds of parents today because of scientific progress related to many of the deadliest infectious diseases.