The Doctor Who Defeated Death's Oldest Weapon

In 1796, a country physician named Edward Jenner in Gloucestershire, England, did something no one had ever done — he deliberately challenged humanity's most relentless killer. Smallpox had ravaged civilizations for three thousand years, scarring pharaohs and burying entire villages. Jenner took material from a cowpox blister on the hand of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes and inoculated eight-year-old James Phipps. Weeks later, he exposed the boy to smallpox itself. The child never fell ill.

That single moment in a rural English village was the firstfruits of a victory that would take nearly two centuries to complete. From Jenner's one successful case, vaccination spread across Europe, then the Americas, then the world. On May 8, 1980, the World Health Organization stood before the global press and declared smallpox officially eradicated — the first human disease ever destroyed entirely.

But it all traced back to one boy, one arm, one afternoon in Gloucestershire.

Paul tells the Corinthians that Christ has been raised as the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. His resurrection was not an isolated miracle — it was the first case in a campaign the Almighty intends to finish. Just as Jenner's single victory guaranteed that smallpox would eventually be put under humanity's feet, Christ's empty tomb guarantees that death itself — the last enemy — will be destroyed. The firstfruits promise the full harvest.