Eight Maids a-Milking

Depending which tradition you follow, counting the first day of Christmas as Dec. 25 or 26, the eighth-day gift from my true love arrived either yesterday or today. Either way, those humble dairymaids deserve their hour in the spotlight. Maids a-milking are an apt image for the dairy farms and cheese factories here in Wisconsin. They’re the first human gifts in the holiday song, following a long series of birds and some rings. And they have done more for the history of public health than any drummers, pipers, leapers, or dancers I know.

In the 1700s, smallpox killed 400,000 people a year in Europe alone. A third of the survivors went blind. But previous infection by common, innocuous cowpox kept dairymaids safe. Using material from the arm of dairymaid Sarah Nelmes, Dr. Edward Jenner infected a boy with cowpox to protect him from smallpox. It worked.

​Since then, vaccination—from vacca, Latin for “cow”—has prevented millions of deaths from measles and other infectious diseases, most of which have nothing to do with cows. “Maids a-milking” faded into folklore with the introduction of milking machines, but their legacy is an ongoing gift to us all.