Peter Plett
German teacher and pioneer of smallpox vaccine (1766-1823)
Peter Plett (29 December 1766 – 29 March 1823) was a teacher and pioneer of smallpox vaccine from the Duchy of Schleswig. His work with smallpox vaccine, undertaken in the early 1790s before the definitive studies by Edward Jenner, was not acknowledged until many years later.
Life
Plett was born on 29 December 1766 in Klein Rheide, Duchy of Schleswig. In 1790, Plett was employed as a home tutor in Schönweide where he learnt from milkmaids about cowpox preventing humans from being infected with smallpox. In 1791, he moved to the Meierhof at Hasselburg in Gut Wittenberg/East-Holstein where he vaccinated its owner Martini's three children with cowpox lymph which protected them against smallpox. Plett was one of at least six people in England, Denmark and Germany (Bose in 1769, Sevel, Jensen and Jesty in 1774, Rendall, Plett in 1791.) tested successfully the possibility of using the cowpox vaccine as an immunization for smallpox in humans. Only five years later, Edward Jenner experiments established the link between cowpox infection and smallpox immunity, which made him world-famous.
In 1790 and again in 1791/92, Plett reported his success to the medical faculty of the University of Kiel, but they favoured the older method of variolation so they did not act on the reports. In 1802 after Jenner's method had reached the area, Plett was interviewed by Friedrich Adolf von Heinze on behalf of Christoph Heinrich Pfaff from the Medical Faculty of the University of Kiel. His report was published by Pfaff and Heinze and later forwarded to the German Office of the government in Copenhagen.
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This entry incorporates text from “Peter Plett” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.