Edward Jenner vaccinating his son, held by Mrs Jenner; a maid rolls up her sleeve, a man stands outside holding a cow. Coloured engraving by C. Manigaud after E Hamman.

The subject purports to be Jenner practising vaccination for the first time. The person receiving the inoculation is an infant. This is presumably the occasion on 17 December 1790, when, according to Fisher and Baxby (opp. cit.) Edward Jenner inoculated his ten-month old infant son Edward with pustulous matter from Edward junior's sometime nurse to protect him against smallpox. The pustulous matter was described as swinepox or pigpox (in which case the inoculation would have been a form of vaccination, though not from a cow). However it may have been smallpox, in which case the inoculation would actually have been variolation and not vaccination. Jenner's vaccination of the eight-year old James Phipps with cowpox matter took place later, in 1796