Why is that everyone in the village died of smallpox, except for the milkmaids, who never got sick? Is this some kind of milkmaid magic? Or is there something in the biographies of each milkmaid that causes them to become... ah, what is the right word? It's almost as if they are, ah, "immune" to smallpox? Is that possible? It's almost as if they get cine (aid) from the cows (vacca). One wonders if we could deliberately give this vacca-cine to people?

Do you have a source on the etymology? I've searched but couldn't find anything. Genuinely curious.

Vaccine comes from the latin "vaccinus", a derivative of "vacca" (cow) and means "related to cow" or in this case more like "of cow origin". For example in italian "latte vaccino" means cow milk. So there is no -cine part, only a "-inus" suffix that simply means "related to" or "coming from". You can see that in a lot of words of latin origin. In fact the term "latin" itself comes from "latinus" which means "related to Latium" or "inhabitant of Latium" (a region in central Italy)

Unrelated, but as for the origin of the latin term "vacca", it may come from vedic, with the meaning of "the animal that moos"

Edit: made my answer more to the point

I often search for the etymology of words. I used to overthink it when trying to find the right search terms but eventually realised that "[word] etymology" gives pretty much perfect results every time ('vaccine etymology' gave the answer on Google and DuckDuckGo without even needing to click any links).

Just mentioning this for other people who like looking up words. And yes it's obvious... unless you're one of those people who sometimes overthinks search terms.

At least wikipedia seems to partially agree (on the cow part), with citations I couldn't verify:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccinia#History

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowpox

I meant on the etymology of cine / aid. Must have valued out when I wrote my previous comment.

ine/inus is a Latin possessive suffix that appears in many words. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/-inus

Thank you, that's what I was after.

Thank you for this. Didn’t know this was the etymology of vaccine!

It's not (the cow part is though; vaccine simply means "from cow").

excellent exploration of this idea in the wonderful history book “The Secrets of Alchemy”.

the author actually followed some alchemical recipes which were thought to be nonsense. yet under the right conditions (using iron implements, bad control of temperatures, impure materials) they produced results that must have seemed miraculous at the time — fluorescent materials, elaborate crystalline structures, and so on.