No feeling of personal ambition, no hope or desire of fame,
sullied the purity of his noble philanthropy. 'While the vaccine
discovery was progressive,' he writes, 'the joy at the prospect
before me of being the instrument destined to take away from the
world one of its greatest calamities, blended with the fond hope
of enjoying independence, and domestic peace and happiness, were
often so excessive, that, in pursuing my favorite subject among
the meadows, I have sometimes found myself in a kind of reverie.
It is pleasant to recollect that those reflections always ended
in devout acknowledgments to that Being from whom this and all
other blessings flow.' At last an opportunity occurred of putting
his theory to the test. On the 14th day of May, 1796,--the day
marks an epoch in the Healing Art, and is not less worthy of
being kept as a national thanksgiving than the day of
Waterloo--the cow-pox matter or pus was taken from the hand of
one Sarah Holmes, who had been infected from her master's cows,
and was inserted by two superficial incisions into the arms of
James Phipps, a healthy boy of about eight years of age. The
cow-pox ran its ordinary course without any injurious effect, and
the boy was afterward inoculated for the small-pox,--happily in
vain.
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