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.
A history of the global spread of vaccination during the Napoleonic Wars, when millions of children were saved from smallpox.
Michael Bennett is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Tasmania. He is the author of four books on late medieval England and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge.
'It's as commonplace as it is true to say that infectious disease
knows no borders. In War Against Smallpox, Michael Bennett offers
us something immeasurably more intriguing: the border crossing of
vaccination. Bennett follows this strange procedure's rapid-fire
travels from London to Spain, India, the Cape, the New World, China
and beyond. And as if that intercontinental story is not
fascinating enough, it all took place either side of 1800, as the
global Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars wrenched the world into a
new century. A major new global history. The world connected
arm-to-arm.' Alison Bashford, University of New South Wales
'A valuable account by a leading scholar of the subject, one that
skilfully links the global range of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century engagement with smallpox. The global spread of
vaccination illustrates more general points about processes of
learning, information, technology and diffusion. Methodologically
acute and conceptually significant.' Jeremy Black, University of
Exeter
'This impressive culmination of 15 years of research minutely
details the international spread not of variola virus, but of its
containment.' Kate Womersley, The Spectator
'This book gives fascinating insight into the challenges of
disseminating scientific information at a time of international
conflict and in the face of opposing campaigns of misinformation …'
Tim Mason, British Society for the History of Medicine
(www.bshm.org.uk)
'An incredible journey, with walk-on parts for Napoleon, Jefferson
and the tsar of Russia.' Gareth Williams, BBC History Magazine
'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
'This is an important book published at an appropriate time.' Niels
Brimnes, Bulletin of the History of Medicine
'The extensive detail and the embellishments of every chapter
result in something approaching a work of reference.' Stuart Blume,
Metascience
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