Where does the word “vaccine” come from?
Funny enough, the word’s origin has no direct linkage to roots meaning medicine, healing, cure or the like. No, “vacca” simply means…cow. The story is: A smart physician from two centuries ago realized that humans who had been infected with and recovered from cowpox — a disease common in cows back then — were immune to smallpox. Given how deadly smallpox was this was a pretty big deal. In fact, although they had already discovered that deliberately infecting healthy people with a mild strain of smallpox produced immunity to its more horrible strain (there were two strains, little bad and really really bad), they switched to using the cowpox virus for this purpose instead; cowpox was way better than even the mild strain of smallpox.
Here’s the irony: “vaccinia” was the name given to the human-inoculated version of the cowpox virus; so the word vaccine is a derivative of a word meaning, well, a type of virus. Now this isn’t too surprising given its premise is “the introduction of a pathogen or antigen into a living organism to stimulate the production of antibodies.”
The suffix “ine” means “made of,” among other things.
So there you have it. “Vaccination” is now almost synonymous with “inoculation.”
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/science/cowpox
