the.com/milkmaid
The original job with job security — until a cow accidentally invented vaccines.
means A woman or girl employed to milk cows and work with dairy.
from A plain compound of 'milk' plus 'maid' (a young woman or female servant), formed the same straightforward way as milkman — the job simply named the worker. The word's brush with history came in the late 1700s, when the folk observation that milkmaids who'd caught cowpox seemed immune to smallpox led a country doctor to test the idea, kickstarting vaccination (from 'vacca,' Latin for cow).
- smallpox clue
- milkmaids who caught cowpox rarely caught smallpox
- jenner's insight
- edward jenner built the first vaccine from that observation
- clear skin myth
- famous for unscarred faces in a pockmarked era
- word origin
- vaccine comes from vacca, latin for cow