War Against Smallpox: Edward Jenner and the Global Spread of Vaccination
Cambridge University Press, 6/18/2020
EAN 9780521147880, ISBN10: 0521147883
Paperback, 438 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm
Language: English
Michael Bennett provides the first history of the global spread of vaccination during the Napoleonic Wars, offering a new assessment of the cowpox discovery and Edward Jenner's achievement in making cowpox inoculation a viable and universally available practice. He explores the networks that took the vaccine around the world, and the reception and establishment of vaccination among peoples in all corners of the globe. His focus is on the human story of the horrors of smallpox, the hopes invested in vaccination by medical men and parents, the children put arm-to-arm across the world, and the early challenges, successes and disappointments. He presents vaccination as a quiet revolution, genuinely emancipatory, but also the sharp end of growing state power. By the end of the war in 1815, millions of children had been vaccinated. The early success of the war against smallpox paved the way to further advances towards eradication.
List of Figures
List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
Preface and Acknowledgements
1. A Tale of Two Diseases
Smallpox and Cowpox
2. Fire with Fire
Smallpox Inoculation in the Eighteenth Century
3. Good Tidings from the Farm
Jenner and the Cowpox Discovery
4. National Mobilisation
Vaccination in Britain and Ireland
5. Vaccine Diaspora
Medical Networks in a World at War
6. The Vaccine's Conquest of Napoleonic Europe
7. The Guardian Pox in Northern Europe
8. Across the Pyrenees
Vaccination in Spain and Portugal
9. Romanovs and Vaktsinovs
Vaccination in the Russian Empire
10. Passage through India
Vaccinaton in South Asia
11. 'This New Inoculation Is No Sham!' Vaccination in North America
12. A New Pox for the New World. Vaccination in Latin America
13. Oceanic Vaccine
The World Encircled
14. The World Arm-to-Arm
Jenner and the Vaccination Revolution
Select Bibliography
Index.