In a small garden hut in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, a country doctor vaccinated an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps against smallpox. That was 1796. In May 2026, 230 years on, the hut made the news again: the world’s first vaccination clinic was set to reopen.
The building is the Temple of Vaccinia, which stands where Dr Edward Jenner once kept his garden. Historic England had placed it on its At Risk Register in 2025. Restoration and better access work followed, and it was due to open its doors on 17 May, Jenner’s 277th birthday. A celebration evening was set for 14 May, precisely two centuries and 30 years after the Phipps vaccination, BBC News reported.
Museum director James Rodliff put it this way: “The Temple of Vaccinia is an unassuming building with a story of global significance: what happened here changed the course of public health.”
The hut and the doctor
The little structure began as an ornamental retreat, built by Jenner’s friend the Reverend Robert Ferryman. Jenner later used it to inoculate local people for free, and he jokingly renamed it the Temple of Vaccinia. The museum, Dr Jenner’s House, says the work is the first stage of a project called “Re-Jenner-ation”, funded by a £221,508 award from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
What Jenner actually did
Here is the human side of the story. By the 18th century it was common knowledge that people who milked cows did not catch smallpox, because cowpox had already given them protection. Jenner learned that a milkmaid, Sarah Nelmes, had cowpox. He took material from the pustules on her hands and inoculated the boy. Months later he exposed the child to smallpox. The boy did not get sick, and Jenner repeated the trial on more people with success.
Jenner did not invent the idea of protecting people from smallpox, though. DW notes that variolation, which meant giving someone material from a smallpox patient’s dried scabs, was already practised across China, India and Arabia. Lady Montague had her son variolated in Constantinople in 1718. In 1721 the Scottish surgeon Charles Maitland tried it on six prisoners, and all survived. It was risky. Variolation carried a death rate of 1 to 100. Natural infection killed 30 out of 100.
Cowpox was the safer route, and that is the point. The word vaccine comes from “vacca,” the Latin for cow. In 1801 Jenner published “The Origin of Vaccine Inoculation.”
Why families still owe him
Smallpox survivors were often left with severe scarring. The World Health Organization began a global eradication campaign in 1959 and declared the disease gone in 1980. DW puts the 20th century death toll at an estimated 300-500 million. The virus had been around for 10,000 years.
Every parent who has held a child’s hand at a vaccination appointment is following a path that runs back to a garden hut in Gloucestershire.
Sources
- World's first vaccination clinic to reopen (BBC News)
- Vaccination: A long and perilous history (DW)
- Vaccination: A long and perilous history (DW), variolation
- Vaccination: A long and perilous history (DW), Jenner
