When Edward was only five years old, he was orphaned

First of all, one of the most interesting facts about Edward Jenner is he was orphaned when he was only five years old. The small English town of Berkeley, which is in the county of Gloucestershire, is where Edward Jenner was born on May 17, 1749. He was the seventh of Reverend Stephen Jenner and Sarah's nine children. Stephen, his father, served as Berkeley's vicar. Edward's parents died when he was only five years old, in 1754. The brothers and sisters raised him. Jenner wed Catherine Kingscote in 1788. Edward (1789), Catherine (1794), and Robert were their three children (1797). While Robert and Catherine outlived Jenner, his oldest son Edward passed away in 1810 from TB. Health problems plagued Jenner's wife her entire life, and in 1815 she too passed away from tuberculosis.

Throughout his life, Edward developed a love for the outdoors. The structures of British medical practice and education were changing gradually when Jenner was born. The gap between surgeons and apothecaries, who received their medical training through apprenticeship rather than academic study, and Oxford- or Cambridge-trained doctors, who were far less educated, was gradually closing, and hospital work was taking on a significant amount of importance.