Feedback request

[Stuart]

We have slowly been starting WWS, slow more because of other commitments than content. My 10 year old son is enjoying the program and grasping the concepts well. I wish I was more confined correcting the assignments. I follow do follow the rubric but I am not a confident writer. This is final draft of his most recently completed assignment. Revisions for this included minor spelling mistakes, combining a couple paragraphs and sentences. Mechanics are always excellent, grammar is solid. I really would just another pair of eyes to take a look at it. Thanks in advance.

 

 

Edward Jenner's Discovery of the Smallpox Vaccine

 

In the eighteenth century, smallpox was a death sentence. I say so because half of the people who caught smallpox died. Sadly, there was no reliable way to get rid of smallpox.

In the year 1773, a doctor named Edward Jenner (1749- 1823) noticed that milkmaids didn't get smallpox. He knew that milkmaids often had cowpox; a disease that gave cows blisters on their udders. When they had cowpox, milkmaids had blisters on their hands and arms and had headaches that lasted 4 days. Some of the local people said if that you had cowpox, you were immune to smallpox. Jenner investigated the relationship between cowpox and smallpox. He discovered two forms of cowpox and decided that only one form made you immune.

On May 14, 1796 Jenner inoculated an 8 year old boy named James Phipps. First, Jenner scraped James's arm and entered pus collected from a cowpox blister. Phipps then developed a small fever. Next, Jenner tried to give Phipps a mild case of smallpox. Phillips was immune! Jenner also tested his vaccine on 23 other people. He did not know why it worked, but he believed his observations to be correct.

When Jenner published his work, other doctors were cautious. The Royal Society of Medicine refused to accept his work. And some people even went so far as to say that the vaccination would make them act like cows! It would not be until 1802 that the vaccine would be accepted.