What Do You Think of Smallpox Inoculation? A Crucial Question in the Eighteenth Century, Not Only for Physicians

Abstract

I would like to preface my remarks with two quotations. The first appeared in the literary supplement to a Braunschweig gazette in 1768:

He who has once admitted to parents that their children may die of the inoculated smallpox has no right to fault them if they do not wish to attempt inoculation upon them. By the same token, one also may not fault those who, despite this presumed possibility, still have the courage and the wisdom to dare to inoculate their children, and not to await natural smallpox—that so widespread, terrible and dangerous illness. If one may lose one’s life to inoculation, but at the same time also be spared by it from contracting natural smallpox, the surest course a wise man can choose is this, to try, by means of his advice, neither to convince others to attempt it nor to refrain from it. Under such circumstances, a father must reserve the decision in this matter for himself alone.¹