Edward Jenner

Edward Jenner is often called the father of immunology, the English physician and scientist whose work is said to have saved more lives than any other person who has ever lived. In an age when smallpox killed roughly one in ten souls on Earth, he noticed that milkmaids who caught the mild cowpox seemed spared the deadly pox, and in 1798 he published his Inquiry that gave the world its first vaccine. The very words vaccine and vaccination come from his Latin for the pustules of the cow.

His Sun in Taurus is the earthy, patient pillar of the zodiac, the bull who builds a foundation and holds it against all comers, unmoved and unhurried. This is the temperament of a man rooted in one Gloucestershire town, faithful to careful observation and to values that would not bend; God himself could beg a Taurus to change his mind and get nowhere. That stubbornness became a gift when the medical establishment doubted him.

His Moon in Gemini gave that steady heart a restless, curious, fact-hungry mind, forever collecting and connecting. It was this same inquisitiveness that led him, as a naturalist, to describe the cuckoo's brood parasitism. Taurus certainty wed to Gemini curiosity: the exact alloy from which a world-changing idea was forged.