War Against Smallpox
Edward Jenner and the Global Spread of Vaccination

A history of the global spread of vaccination during the Napoleonic Wars, when millions of children were saved from smallpox.

Michael Bennett (Author)

9780521147880, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 18 June 2020

434 pages
22.8 x 15.3 x 2.2 cm, 0.62 kg

'Bennett's work draws on a huge body of primary and secondary literature to create a coherent story of the spread of vaccination around the globe … Nevertheless, Bennett's work has a much wider implication, providing historians with a model of how (and how successfully) ideas and practices moved around in the early nineteenth century, just before the emergence of the modern profession with its expectations of the rapid exchange of new knowledge through medical journals and societies.' Deborah Brunton, Social History of Medicine

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.

Subject Areas: History of science [PDX], History of medicine [MBX], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], General & world history [HBG]