Edward Jenner

12 Key excerpts on "Edward Jenner"

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  Dispatches from the Vaccine Wars

  Fighting for Human Freedom During the Great Reset

  • Christopher A. Shaw(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Skyhorse

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 2 Vaccination History, Theory, and Practice: A Brief Overview

  Ere I proceed, let me be permitted to observe, that truth, in this and every other physiological inquiry that has occupied my attention, has ever been the object of my pursuit; and should it appear in the present instance, that I have been led into error, fond as I may appear to the offspring of my labours, I had rather see it perish at once, than exist and do a public injury

  .

  —Edward Jenner1

  Edward Jenner and the Formal Beginning of Vaccination

  Dr. Edward Jenner is widely considered to be the founder of the theory and practice of vaccination based on his work and publications concerning smallpox in the late 1790s and later. In turn, Jenner’s work, along with that of Dr. Louis Pasteur, fifty or so years later, is also believed to have laid the foundations for the science of immunology. Most of the published literature I have seen broadly agrees with this assessment.2

  However, as noted by Gross and Sepkowitz, scientific breakthroughs in any field are rarely due to one person alone. As these authors write:

  However, actual examples of the lone genius phenomenon, in which an investigator single-handedly resolves a large problem, are few and far between. Much more commonly, developments represent the culmination of decades, if not centuries of work, conducted by hundreds of persons, complete with false starts, wild claims, and bitter rivalries. The breakthrough is really the latest in a series of small incremental advances, perhaps the one that has finally reached clinical relevance. Yet once a breakthrough is proclaimed, and the attendant hero identified, the work of the many others falls into distant shadow, far away from the adoring view of the public.3

  The above is certainly true in Jenner’s case, as the initial attempts at actual vaccination with cowpox to prevent smallpox may go back to another English physician, Dr. Benjamin Jesty, in 1774. To put this into context, let’s consider Jenner’s history.

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  Germ Theory

  Medical Pioneers in Infectious Diseases

  • Robert P. Gaynes(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • ASM Press

    (Publisher)

  93 7 Edward Jenner and the Discovery of Vaccination Medicine has made a few extraordinary contributions that have dramatically improved human existence, but vaccination remains its greatest contribution. What other discovery has eradicated a dis- ease from the face of the earth? Not just any disease but one of the most devastating illnesses in human history—smallpox. As mag- nificent an accomplishment as global eradication of smallpox was, the achievement that made it all possible began in the 18th century, even before the germ theory of disease was an accepted medical theory. One of the greatest achievements in medicine, smallpox vaccination, is worth scrutinizing. In order to understand the gen- esis and the impact of this discovery, one must first study the hor- rifying history of smallpox, especially in the 18th century, when the disease was at its peak of devastation in Europe. The 18th-century theories that attempted to explain the disease are emblematic of the hodgepodge of medical thought that occurred with the closing stages of the humoral theory of medicine but preceded the germ theory of disease, which was developed in the 19th century. Under- standing these theories about smallpox in the 18th century helps to explain what Edward Jenner and others were up against in order to hypothesize, test, and prove the theory of vaccination to a skeptical and critical medical world. 94 Germ Theory: Medical Pioneers in Infectious Diseases The Disease of Smallpox Smallpox was a disease (I use the past tense for the malady since the last natural, non-laboratory-acquired case occurred in 1977 and in spite of the danger of smallpox as a bioterrorism threat) caused by the variola virus, which affected only human hosts. The virus entered the human by the respiratory tract in most cases. After an incubation period of about 12 days, the virus produced an acute febrile illness.

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  Makers of Modern Medicine

  • James J. Walsh(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Start Publishing LLC

    (Publisher)

  Edward Jenner, the Discoverer of Vaccination

  “It helps a man immensely to be a bit of a hero worshipper, and the stories of the lives of the masters of medicine do much to stimulate our ambition and rouse our sympathies. If the life and work of such men as Bichat and Laennec will not stir the blood of a young man and make him feel proud of France and of Frenchmen, he must be a dull and muddy-mettled rascal. In reading the life of Hunter, of Jenner, who thinks of the nationality which is merged and lost in our interest in the man and in his work! In the halcyon days of the Renaissance there was no nationalism in medicine, but a fine catholic spirit made great leaders like Vesalius, Eustachius, Stenson and others at home in every country in Europe.” —Osler, Aequanimitas and other Essays.

  A very striking life in its lessons for the serious student of medical problems is that of Edward Jenner, who first demonstrated to the world that a simple attack of mild, never fatal, cowpox, deliberately acquired, might serve as a protective agent against the deadly smallpox, which before that time raged so violently all over the civilized world. His successful solution of this problem has probably saved more lives and suffering than any other single accomplishment in the whole history of medicine. While this fact is apparently not generally appreciated, Jenner’s discovery did not come by mere chance, but was the result of his genius for original investigation, which led him to make many other valuable observations covering nearly the whole range of medicine; nor indeed was his activity limited to medicine alone, but extended itself to many of the allied sciences, and even to scientific departments quite beyond the domain of medicine.

  In medicine we owe to Jenner the first hint of the possible connection between rheumatism and heart disease. He pointed out, at a discussion in a little English medical society, how often affections of the heart occurred in those who had suffered from previous attacks of rheumatism. He was among the first, perhaps the very first, to hint at the pathological basis of angina pectoris. While Heberden’s name is usually connected with this discovery, there seems good reason to think that already Jenner had independently noted and called attention to the frequency with which degenerative affections of the arteries within the heart muscle itself were to be found where during life heart-pang had been a prominent and annoying symptom.

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  Germ Theory

  Medical Pioneers in Infectious Diseases

  • Robert P. Gaynes(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • ASM Press

    (Publisher)

  Edward Jenner: EARLY INFLUENCES Amidst all of England’s struggles with smallpox, Edward Jenner was born in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, near Bristol, on 17 May 1749. Many aspects of his child- hood had a profound effect on him and on his discovery of vaccination. His father, Stephan, was a clergyman; his mother, Sarah, was the daughter of a clergyman. Edward was one of nine children, two of whom did not survive to adulthood. He was the eighth child in the family. His mother died in childbirth on delivery of the 94 • Germ Theory: Medical Pioneers in Infectious Diseases ninth child. Two months later, Edward’s father died, leaving him an orphan at the tender age of 5 years. His older siblings struggled to raise the boy. When Edward was 8 years old, he was sent to a free boarding school in England, where events occurred that would shape his life. The school suffered an epidemic of smallpox. All children, including Edward, who had not had the disease, were pulled from the school, and prepared for variolation. Jenner was bled until his blood was “thin,” purged repeatedly till his body was wasted to a skeleton and kept on a low-vegetable diet in a stable (8). After preparations, each boy had the variolation. Amazingly, none of the 12 students died from the procedure. Edward, of course, survived but was badly damaged because of the incident, suffering anxiety and insomnia for years. As a result, his family moved him to a small private school, where Edward recovered. His poor academics in certain areas prevented him from following in his father’s footsteps: going to Oxford and becoming a clergyman. With his aptitude in science and his keen interest in nature, medicine became his chosen field. MILKMAIDS, COWPOX, AND SMALLPOX Eventually, Jenner became an apprentice to a country surgeon, a position he retained for 6 years. One account of Jenner’s life suggests that during this period, he overheard a dairymaid say, I shall never have smallpox for I have had cowpox.

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  Germ Theory

  Medical Pioneers in Infectious Diseases

  • Robert P. Gaynes(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • ASM Press

    (Publisher)

  7 Edward Jenner and the Discovery of Vaccination

  Medicine has made a few extraordinary contributions that have dramatically improved human existence, but vaccination remains its greatest contribution. What other discovery has eradicated a disease from the face of the earth? Not just any disease but one of the most devastating illnesses in human history—smallpox. As magnificent an accomplishment as global eradication of smallpox was, the achievement that made it all possible began in the 18th century, even before the germ theory of disease was an accepted medical theory. One of the greatest achievements in medicine, smallpox vaccination, is worth scrutinizing. To understand the genesis and the impact of this discovery, one must first study the horrifying history of smallpox, especially in the 18th century, when the disease was at its peak of devastation in Europe. The 18th‐century theories that attempted to explain the disease are emblematic of the hodgepodge of medical thought that occurred with the closing stages of the humoral theory of medicine but preceded the germ theory of disease, which was developed in the 19th century. Understanding these theories about smallpox in the 18th century helps to explain what Edward Jenner and others were up against in order to hypothesize, test, and prove the theory of vaccination to a skeptical and critical medical world.

  THE DISEASE OF SMALLPOX

  Smallpox was a disease (I use the past tense for the malady since the last natural, non‐laboratory‐acquired case occurred in 1977 and in spite of the danger of smallpox as a bioterrorism threat) caused by the variola virus, which affected only human hosts. The virus entered the human by the respiratory tract in most cases. After an incubation period of about 12 days, the virus produced an acute febrile illness. While there are two variants, variola major and variola minor, the former produced the more severe disease and was more common. The initial symptoms were fever, malaise, muscle aches, and headache and extreme prostration. By the third day or so, spots began to appear in the mouth, nasal passages, tongue, and throat. Large amounts of virus were present in saliva during this time. One or two days later, a skin rash appeared, first as spots but then as vesicles, or fluid‐filled, raised skin lesions. These lesions tended to occur over the face, the distal parts of the extremities, and less on the trunk. These vesicles were filled with cellular debris and by 7 to 10 days after onset of the illness appeared to be pustules, although they were not actually filled with pus. Characteristically, these firm pustules appeared simultaneously and were of equal size, usually about 1

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  Between Hope and Fear

  • Michael Kinch(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Pegasus Books

    (Publisher)

  31 This second version states that Fewster then immunized three children. The motivations, machinations, and recollection of what occurred that night remain foggy but suggest Fewster took some time away from his “day-job” variolating to experiment during that spring of 1796. Fewster himself remains mostly silent on the subject, especially since the controversy was not aired until more than a decade after his death in 1824.

  In the same year Fewster was revisiting the concept of cowpox immunization, we return to the central figure of our story, Edward Jenner. Jenner’s contribution to vaccines began in 1796, forty-one years after Fewster’s puzzlement with the smallpox-resistant brothers (who had previously had cowpox), five years after Jesty, and coincident with Fewster’s renewed experimentation with cowpox. Despite not being the first to conceive of the idea, Jenner is rightly recognized as a key contributor to the adoption of vaccination by the medical community. His work is recognized largely because he was the first to invoke proper scientific method to evaluate multiple subjects and analyze the results prior to disseminating his work to the medical and scientific communities. In particular, Jenner’s work was cited and reviewed by the world’s most prestigious medical association of the time, the Royal Society of London.32

  As word of the discovery spread, Jenner was placed in positions of escalating responsibility to expand the adoption of smallpox vaccination. Given the increasing burden on his time, Jenner petitioned Parliament for a grant to pay for his services. While discussing how best to reward Jenner for services to his country, Parliament sought assistance from George Pearson, a prominent physician and advocate for vaccination.33 Pearson relayed rumors arising from southeast England that Jenner had not discovered the vaccine and that this was indeed the act of a previously unknown farmer from Dorset. These stories were largely set aside and Jenner received the bulk of credit from Parliament, along with grants of more than thirty thousand pounds sterling over the next ten years.

  Back in Dorset, Benjamin Jesty came to learn of the accolades being showered upon Jenner. Remembering the abuse that had triggered his family to flee their home in Yetminter, he was understandably loathe about bragging of his own experiments years before. Nonetheless, Jesty was encouraged to do so by his local rector, Andrew Bell, with whom he had privately shared his earlier experiment.

  34 ,

  35

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  Bioinformatics for Vaccinology

  • Darren R. Flower(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Edward Jenner was in many ways a remarkable man; in others, he was very much a contradictory – even a paradoxical – figure. There is much in the life of Edward Jenner that his enemies and opponents could find and exploit in order to support their critical assessment of the man and his work. After a brief period of 24 CH 1 VACCINES: THEIR PLACE IN HISTORY initial medical training in London, Jenner, a native of Gloucestershire, spent his entire career working as a country doctor. With the possible exception of a trip to Edinburgh, it was said that he never travelled more than 150 miles from his birthplace. Yet, one should not dismiss the man, as many have seemingly done, as no more than a parochial rural doctor. No, indeed not. He was certainly much more than that. Above all, perhaps, Jenner was well connected, making both social contacts and scientific contacts of the first water. He was part of the minor landed-gentry in the area, and he possessed that most useful thing: a modest independent income. His medical status, compounded by his many social connections, guaranteed him clients among both the local gentry and the aristocracy. Contacts made during his brief student days in London numbered many amongst the highest echelons of the British scientific and medical establishments. Described by some as awkward, Jenner nonetheless possessed the good fortune of being able to build and maintain friendships. Indeed, he seems a fully rounded man. He was, apparently, a respected, kindly and approachable physician; indeed the kind of medical practitioner we would all like to have but seldom find, at least not in the early twenty-first century. He also played his part in the fashionable life of Cheltenham; but again, Jenner was more than well connected and convivial. His work on the cuckoo, for example, or his cataloguing of specimens from Cook’s voyages, suggests that he was gifted as well as socially successful.

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  Vaccination and Its Critics

  A Documentary and Reference Guide

  • Lisa Rosner(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  3

  VACCINATION BY DESIGN: SMALLPOX (1790s–1830s)

  DR. JENNER’S VACCINATION REWARDED BY PARLIAMENT

  • Document: George C. Jenner, Evidence at Large, as Laid before the Committee of the House of Commons, Respecting Dr. Jenner’s Discovery of Vaccine Inoculation
  • Date: 1805
  • Where: London, United Kingdom
  • Significance: Edward Jenner’s experiments showed it was scientifically feasible to artificially stimulate an immune response in people, using a biological agent other than the disease organism. He did this by using a mild disease, cowpox, to create an immune response to a deadly disease, smallpox. His insight, followed by careful experimentation, created the science of vaccines. In 1805, the British Parliament passed a resolution awarding him £10,000, because he had made the new technique available to everyone, rather than treating it as a trade secret and patenting it for his own profit. This was, in effect, the beginning of government support for vaccination research.

  DOCUMENT

  [No. 1] The Committee having met, Dr. Jenner was called upon for his evidence, which he delivered in the form of a printed paper as follows:

  My inquiry into the nature of the cow-pox commenced upwards of twenty-five years ago. My attention to this singular disease was first excited by observing, that among those whom in the country I was frequently called upon to inoculate, many resisted every effort to give them the smallpox. These patients I found had undergone a disease they called the cow-pox, contracted by milking cows affected with a peculiar eruption on their teats. On inquiry, it appeared that it had been known among the dairies time immemorial, and that a vague opinion prevailed that it was a preventive of the small-pox …

  DID YOU KNOW?

  Napoleon and Jenner

  Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) was a towering figure in late18th- and early 19th-century history. A brilliant general, he rose to power in France in the aftermath of the French Revolution, becoming consul in 1799 and declaring himself emperor in 1804. During the first eight years of his government, he led French armies to victory against all the great powers of Europe while carrying out legal and political reforms at home.

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  New Generation Vaccines

  • Myrone M. Levine, Myron M. Levine, Gordon Dougan, Michael F. Good, Margaret A. Liu, Gary J. Nabel, James P. Nataro, Rino Rappuoli, Myrone M. Levine, Myron M. Levine, Gordon Dougan, Michael F. Good, Gary J. Nabel, James P. Nataro, Rino Rappuoli, Myrone M. Levine, Myron M. Levine, Gordon Dougan, Michael F. Good, Gary J. Nabel, James P. Nataro, Rino Rappuoli(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  Jenner had the foresight and perseverance to publish his results and, for the rest of his professional life, promulgated the practice of ‘‘vaccine inoculation’’ (10,11). During the 19th century, smallpox vaccination became increasingly popular and accepted in other areas, including Europe and North America (4). A remarkable and often forgot-ten global public health campaign was the Royal Philanthropic Expedition of the Vaccine commissioned by King Charles IV of Spain and directed by the physicians Francisco Xavier de Balmis and Jose ´ Salvany, that between 1802 and 1806 took the smallpox vaccine to Spain’s territories in the Americas and the Philippines (12,13). It is fitting that smallpox became the first (and so far the only) communicable disease to be actively eradicated, an accomplishment achieved in the decade 1967 to 1977. An enigma that remains unresolved after the eradica-tion of smallpox concerns the origin of vaccinia, the smallpox vaccine virus. Whatever its origin, vaccinia is a separate species within Orthopoxvirus genetically distinct from both cowpox and variola viruses. Cowpox is in fact a rodent virus that occasion-ally infects other mammalian hosts (14). Hypotheses that have been promulgated include that it represents a hybrid between cowpox and variola virus, that it derives from cowpox virus, or that it is a descendant of a virus (perhaps of equine hosts) that Figure 1 Edward Jenner (1749–1823), the father of vaccinology. An 1800 pastel portrait of Edward Jenner by J. R. Smith. Source : Photo courtesy of The Wellcome Institute Library, London, U.K. Figure 2 Louis Pasteur (1822–1895), a 19th century pioneer of vaccinology. Source : Photo courtesy of Institute Pasteur, Paris, France. 2 Levine et al. no longer exists in nature. The recent sequencing of the genome of horsepoxvirus seems to support the concept that the vaccinia virus may indeed have been derived from horsepox, an origin that Jenner himself suspected (15).

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  A History of Medicine

  • Lois N. Magner, Oliver Kim, Oliver J Kim(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  Eighteenth century standards of proof, medical ethics, consent, and clinical trials were very different from those proclaimed by modern medicine. Jenner’s evidence would probably intrigue, but certainly not convince a modern research review board. In addition to compiling case histories, Jenner performed experiments on the transmission of cowpox. At the time, variolation was an accepted part of medical practice and the threat of wild smallpox was ubiquitous. Thus, Jenner’s patients were not subjected to risks they would not otherwise have encountered. Jenner’s most famous case was that of eight-year-old James Phipps who was inoculated in May 1796 with fluid taken from a cowpox lesion on the hand of a milkmaid named Sara Nelmes. About a week later, the boy complained of mild discomfort, but he recovered without any complications. When Jenner performed a test inoculation, using fresh pus taken from a patient with smallpox, Phipps appeared to be immune to inoculated smallpox. Jenner also inoculated his own son with cowpox fluid and later tested his immunity against smallpox pus. After many successful trials, Jenner concluded that a person affected by cowpox virus “is forever after secure from the infection of the small pox.” Vaccination was actually particularly valuable during smallpox outbreaks because it protects people who are vaccinated within four days of exposure to smallpox, that is, before the patient has experienced any smallpox symptoms.

  Edward Jenner vaccinating James Phipps with cowpox. (Reproduced from Shutterstock. Image ID: 237229861.)

  To distinguish between the old practice of inoculation with smallpox matter and his new method, in 1800 Jenner coined the term vaccination . (The terms “vaccine” and “vaccination” were later broadened to include immunization against other diseases. When speaking of the history of smallpox, however, it is important to distinguish inoculation from vaccination.) For the sake of convenience, and to distance his procedure from unwelcome associations with “brute animals,” Jenner proved that cowpox could be transmitted from person to person.

  Critics denounced Jenner as a quack and insisted that deliberately transmitting disease from animals to human beings was a loathsome, immoral, vile, and dangerous act. Jenner’s allies called vaccination the greatest discovery in the history of medicine. Physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, clergymen, and assorted opportunists vied for control of vaccination. But maintaining control was impossible because recipients of the vaccine could use their own cowpox pustules to vaccinate family and friends. Experience substantiated Jenner’s major contention: vaccination was simple, safe, and effective. Vaccination rapidly displaced inoculation. Within one brief decade, enterprising practitioners had carried vaccines all around the world. Threads impregnated with cowpox lymph were generally the medium of transmission, but on long voyages vaccine could be kept alive by a series of person-to-person transfers. A major difficulty in assuring the continuity of the chain of vaccination was finding individuals who had not previously contracted smallpox or cowpox.

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  A History of Immunology

  • Arthur M. Silverstein(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  2 The Royal Experiment on Immunity, 1721-1722 B Y THE middle of the seventeenth century, smallpox (along with typhus) had replaced the plague as the leading infectious disease causing death in the adult population of Europe. 1 Epidemics of smallpox appeared with increasing frequency 2 and were all the more noticed because, unlike many other contemporary diseases, they afflicted the rich and powerful as well as the poor. 3 Many feared the disease as much for the disfigurement suffered by its survivors as for its impressive mortality, which averaged some 15 to 20% of those infected. 4 It is customary to credit Edward Jenner with the development of the first effective immunization procedure to protect against an infectious disease. But when Jenner first published his findings on the use of cowpox vaccination in 1798, 5 there already existed an equally effective and (for the times) reasonably safe immunization procedure. This was smallpox inoculation, involving the (usually) dermal infection of the subject with the wild virus, which most often resulted in a mild, transient illness that thenceforth protected the individual against more severe forms of the disease. Prior to Jenner's publication, this procedure had been practiced with generally favorable results for some three-quarters of a century in polite society in Europe, and long before that was employed in many countries as a standard practice in the folk medicine Originally written in collaboration with Geneviève Miller. 24 The Royal Experiment on Immunity, 1721-1722 25 of more primitive peoples. It was, of course, common knowledge in the eighteenth century (and earlier) that a case of smallpox conferred life-long immunity. The manner in which the practice of smallpox inoculation was introduced into England, where it first attained broad recognition and application, 6 is of great interest in several respects.

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  Biopolitical Surveillance and Public Health in International Politics

  • J. Youde(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  14 By this time, variolation had largely fallen out of favor. Due to the political disruptions of the Great Leap Forward, though, normal smallpox control activities had been suspended, and local communities reinstated variolation programs. Thanks in part to these dangers, the search continued for an even more effective means of preventing smallpox. This search eventually led to vaccination. The tale has become common lore in the history of science. Edward Jenner, an English physician, noticed that dairymaids who contracted cowpox, a disease related to smallpox but far less fatal, rarely contracted smallpox. He wondered whether the deliberate intro- duction of cowpox could prevent smallpox. On May 14, 1796, Jenner took material from fresh cowpox lesions on the hands of Sarah Nelms and inoculated eight-year-old James Phipps. Two months later, Jenner introduced matter from fresh smallpox lesions under Phipps’ skin, but the boy did not develop smallpox. 15 From this experiment, Jenner con- cluded that the vaccination worked and could be used on a large scale. He published his results in 1798, but initially met with a mixed reac- tion. His supporters, though, enthusiastically spread the word about vaccination, and the practice spread throughout England and the rest of Europe in the early part of the nineteenth century. 16 Vaccination S M A L L P OX : D E F E AT I NG T H E S C OU RG E 69 allowed local communities to protect their people against the disease and, with luck, prevent smallpox from ever returning to their midst. With the discovery of vaccination’s efficacy and the technique’s spread, smallpox infection rates in Europe and North America declined throughout the nineteenth century. Bavaria, Denmark, Hanover, Norway, and Sweden all introduced compulsory vaccina- tion laws by 1821, and other European countries soon followed.

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