Benjamin is the most famous member of the Jesty family. It will probably take a hundred more years before teachers and textbooks get it straight, but it is now well accepted among experts that he was the first person known to deliberately infect someone with cowpox in order to protect against smallpox. [The scrupulous inclusion of the word "known" appears on Benjamin's gravestone in Worth Matravers churchyard.] Benjamin did his first vaccination in 1774. He was living at Upbury Farm in Yetminster, and did the vaccination at a neighbour's farm in Chetnole. He vaccinated his wife Elizabeth and his two young children, Robert and Benjamin, and did it in a manner extraordinarily similar to the modern method: infecting the arm through a scratch, in Benjamin's case with a darning needle. Even by the standards of two centuries ago, it is surprising to note that he risked this on his son Benjamin, who was only two years old. On the other hand, smallpox was raging at the time, so the risk in not doing the experiment was considerable. The date was more than 20 years before Edward Jenner did the almost identical thing (though from a pock on a human, not a cow) and made his claim of priority.
A detailed account is in the paper of Patrick Pead in The Lancet, here. Mr Pead also gave a talk on Benjamin in Yetminster Church Hall in November 2003, attended by a good number of Jestys, and he kindly took pictures of the family group. Here they all are. Mr Pead is the first to mention in print that Benjamin and Jenner lived less than 100 miles apart, in north Dorset and Gloucestershire. Even by 18th-century standards, it is quite feasible that word of something as momentous as vaccination could travel that far in 20 years. While Benjamin's first, and very successful, experiment was done when he lived in Yetminster, he is known to have continued to vaccinate people after moving to Downshay in Worth Matravers in the Purbecks (in 1797).
