Reading a highly-cited paper that says "Over 300 years have elapsed since the first vaccine was discovered." But it's actually been 229 years. 2025-1796=229 - ThreadSky

scientificdiscovery.dev • 16 days ago

Reading a highly-cited paper that says "Over 300 years have elapsed since the first vaccine was discovered."

But it's actually been 229 years.

2025-1796=229

Comments

jdportes.bsky.social•16 days ago

variolation not vaccination, presumably?

jdportes.bsky.social•16 days ago

[which of course had long been practiced in non-Western countries but was (supposedly) introduced in Europe early 18th century. So the more serious error here is sloppy unthinking eurocentrism 😉]

scientificdiscovery.dev•16 days ago

https://bsky.app/profile/scientificdiscovery.dev/post/3lhl7cvvesk2s

jdportes.bsky.social•16 days ago

OK. I thought this was a good explainer and the timing seems to fit..

https://www.who.int/news-room/spotlight/history-of-vaccination/history-of-smallpox-vaccination

jdportes.bsky.social•16 days ago

but yes looking at the article and it seems like he just didn't do the arithmetic and nobody noticed 😉

rmcelreath.bsky.social•16 days ago

I've seen that before, and I think it's because people count Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and inoculation against smallpox. Which was supposedly done already in Turkey at the time. Like 1720 or so? Clearly some interpretation going on with what "vaccine" means there.

scientificdiscovery.dev•16 days ago

I don't think so, the author specifically distinguishes variolation and vaccination in his work

rmcelreath.bsky.social•16 days ago

Hm the math error hypothesis increases in probability!

scientificdiscovery.dev•16 days ago

He also traces back variolation to the 1570s in China 😅

peter-donnelly.bsky.social•16 days ago

To be fair the Ottomans had been doing this for an unknown amount of time before Jenner rediscovered it

tkaiser.science•16 days ago

But that's true only if "canonization by Western medicine" constitutes "discovery", right? The fact that West African tribes used smallpox inoculation for who knows how long doesn't count here?

scientificdiscovery.dev•16 days ago

No, variolation is quite different from vaccination, and the author distinguishes them

tkaiser.science•16 days ago

Ok. Then it's a weird error.

scientificdiscovery.dev•16 days ago

Variolation traces back much longer than 300 years anyway (possibly more than 400 or 500)

dcwalley.bsky.social•13 days ago

From at least the 15th century, ... intentionally exposing healthy people to smallpox– a practice known as variolation (after a name for smallpox, ‘la variole’). Some sources suggest these practices were taking place as early as 200 BCE. https://www.who.int/news-room/spotlight/history-of-vaccination/a-brief-history-of-vaccination

essaywells.bsky.social•16 days ago

The simplest explanation is that the author simply thought "21st century to 18th century = three centuries" and went with it, and no other person in the process noticed.

dingdingpeng.the100.ci•16 days ago

Order of magnitude is right (10^2), the rest is measurement error. Who cares about numbers anyway!!!

rosewind.bsky.social•16 days ago

Ooh, I’d have spotted that because* my (checks family tree) great great great great great grandfather (may have missed a great there) is in this etching of Edward Jenner and other “Men of Science living in 1807-8”

*and because I’m obsessed with vaccines

https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitExtended/mw00102/Men-of-Science-Living-in-1807-8?LinkID=mp01651&role=sit&rNo=1

scientificdiscovery.dev•16 days ago

Wow!!

adamjkucharski.bsky.social•16 days ago

Please tell me those citations aren’t for the 300 years value!

adamjkucharski.bsky.social•16 days ago

(Always amazed at how many times my papers are cited for a random fact I quoted in the introduction…)

scientificdiscovery.dev•16 days ago

Hah, I hope they're not. It's a review of the history of vaccination and that was the 2nd sentence..

notjustdna.bsky.social•16 days ago

You wish a history of vaccination would in particular get it right!

birditstheword.bsky.social•16 days ago

Glad you caught that. Maybe let the publishers know?

scientificdiscovery.dev•16 days ago

[The paper was published in 2014, so it's actually slightly more inaccurate.]

hiddenpinky.bsky.social•16 days ago

There's a typo in the date. It should be 2114. It's a paper from the future.

scientificdiscovery.dev•16 days ago

I only noticed because another piece by the same author says "Vaccine development has now entered its fourth century."*

I was surprised because my takeaway was that it was relatively recent, historically speaking. We had little protection from diseases for a very long time.

*technically true-ish

ladydeirdre.bsky.social•16 days ago

Technically true, though it only caught 4 years of the 18th century. But yes, 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st is four different centuries.

scientificdiscovery.dev•16 days ago

Anyway, I'd love to see a numerical extension to spellcheck software

dggoldst.bsky.social•16 days ago

There's this

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/perspectives-engine/

by @jakehofman.bsky.social and me

scientificdiscovery.dev•16 days ago

Very cool!

economeager.bsky.social•16 days ago

i wonder if the author may have been thinking of inoculation more generally? i was surprised to learn how old the practice of inoculation is, but of course if that was the intended reference it's much more than 3 centuries old https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n03/steven-shapin/a-pox-on-the-poor

scientificdiscovery.dev•16 days ago

No, the author distinguishes them in the piece, and as you say, variolation was much older

dcwalley.bsky.social•13 days ago

This research gets us closer to 300. 1768, perhaps 1720, but no medical journals until 1731. https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medical-critical-thinking-history/white-lie-heart-vaccine-history

politicory.bsky.social•16 days ago

Maybe the metric is 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, 2000s. Round up by century!

scientificdiscovery.dev•16 days ago

I was thinking the same!

paulstenton.bsky.social•16 days ago

Don't tell the anti-vaxxers, they'll be spinning on their heads.

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