Abstract
In 1803, the newly established Royal Jennerian Society expressed confidence that the complete extermination of smallpox was under their control. ‘It is not in the course of human probability that centuries will again present such an opportunity of doing good’, it declared.1 Five years earlier, Edward Jenner’s An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccine had demonstrated that deliberate exposure to the infection of cowpox conferred permanent protection from the much more serious and contagious disease of smallpox. This process, developed in the fields of rural England, seemed safer and decidedly more modern than the practice of inoculating with live smallpox matter that had been introduced to Britain earlier in the eighteenth century.2
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Notes
Edward Jenner, An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccine (London: Sampson Low, 1798).
David Arnold, Colonizing the Body (London, Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 1993), 139–40.
Michael Bennett, ‘Smallpox and Cowpox under the Southern Cross: The Smallpox Epidemic of 1789 and the Advent of Vaccination in Colonial Australia’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 83 (2009), 37–62
Martha Few, ‘Circulating Smallpox Knowledge: Guatemalan Doctors, Maya Indians and Designing Spain’s Smallpox Vaccination Expedition’, British Journal for the History of Science, 43 (2010), 519–37
Catherine Mark and José G. Rigau-Pérez, ‘The World’s First Immunization Campaign: The Spanish Smallpox Vaccine Expedition, 1803–1813’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 83 (2009), 63–94.
Mark Harrison, Disease and the Modern World (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 64.
J.Z. Bowers, ‘The Odyssey of Smallpox Vaccination’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 55 (1981), 17–33
Niels Brimnes, ‘Variolation, Vaccination and Popular Resistance in Early Colonial South India’, Medical History, 48 (2004), 199–228.
Andrea Rusnock, ‘Catching Cowpox: The Early Spread of Smallpox Vaccination, 1798–1810’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 83 (2009), 17–36
Michael Bennett, ‘Jenner’s Ladies: Women and Vaccination in Early-Nineteenth Century Britain’, History, 93:312 (2008), 497–513.
David Arnold, ‘Smallpox and Colonial Medicine in Nineteenth-Century India’, in David Arnold (ed.), Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies: Disease, Medicine and Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 45–65.
Nadja Durbach, Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853–1907 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 6
Sanjoy Bhattacharya, Mark Harrison and Michael Worboys, Fractured States: Smallpox, Public Health and Vaccination Policy in British India, 1800–1947 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2005)
Harish Naraindas, ‘Care, Welfare and Treason: The Advent of Vaccination in the 19th Century’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 32 (1998), 67–96.
Melissa Leach and James Fairhead, Vaccine Anxieties: Global Science, Child Health & Society (London: Earthscan, 2007), 2.
Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene. A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 15
Alison Bashford, ‘Foreign Bodies: Vaccination, Contagion and Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century’, in Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker (eds), Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 39–60
M.F. Wagstaffe, Strictures on the Cow Pox, or Vaccine Inoculation (Southwark: W. Kemmish, 1800), 1
John Coakley Lettsom, MD, Expositions on the Inoculation of the Smallpox and of the Cow Pock, 2nd edn (London: H. Fry, 1806), 1
Thomas Trotter, Medicina Nautica, Vol. 1, 2nd edn (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1804), 387–8.
Brian Vale and Griffith Edwards, Physician to the Fleet: The Life and Times of Thomas Trotter, 1760–1832 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), 137.
Alan G. Brunger, ‘Geographical Propinquity among Pre-Famine Catholic Irish settlers in Upper Canada’, Journal of Historical Geography, 8 (1982), 265–82
Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, Migration and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 17
Elizabeth Jane Errington, Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 16
Carol Bennett, Peter Robinson’s Settlers (Renfrew: Juniper Books, 1987).
Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xv.
Deborah Brunton, The Politics of Vaccination: Practice and Policy in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, 1800–1874 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008), 15–16.
John Thomson, Historical Sketch of the Opinions Entertained by Medical Men Respecting the Varieties and the Secondary Occurrence of Small-pox (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown/Edinburgh: David Brown, 1822), 397–8.
John Jennings Cribb, On Small-pox and Cow-pox (Cambridge: W. & W. Hatfield, 1825), 70.
See, for example, Dr Erdmann, ‘On Vaccine Matter’, Lancet, 8:205 (4 August 1827), 553–4
John Leeson, ‘Phenomena in Vaccination’, Lancet, 12:303 (20 June 1829), 364
Richard Laming, ‘On Vaccination’, Lancet, 12:305 (4 July 1829), 420–1
William Howison, ‘Remarks on Vaccination’, Lancet, 16:411 (16 July 1831), 494–7.
Anon., ‘small-Pox Hospital’, Lancet, 2:37 (12 June 1824), 349–51, 350; Dr. Delagrange, ‘On the Present State of Vaccination in France’, Lancet, 12:310 (8 August 1829), 582.
John Epps, MD, ‘London Vaccine Institutions’, Lancet, 16:406 (11 June 1831), 331–3.
Admiralty, Instructions for Surgeons-Superintendents on Board Convict Ships (London: William Clowes, 1838)
‘P. Reilly, Esq. RN’, 2. For further discussion on emigrant and convict voyages to Australia, see Katherine Foxhall, Health, Medicine and the Sea: Australian Voyages: c.1815–1860 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012)
See, for example, John Ring, A Caution Against Vaccine Swindlers and Imposters (London: J. Callow, 1816).
Epps, ‘London Vaccine Institutions’; Medicus, ‘Reply to the Statement of Dr Epps’, Lancet, 16:412 (25 June 1831), 416.
For more on biomedical exchange, see Warwick Anderson, ‘The Possession of Kuru: Medical Science and Biocolonial Exchange’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42:4 (2000), 713–44.
The 1833 Act of Emancipation formally ended slavery in the British Empire on 1 August 1834. In the West Indies a transitional period known as apprenticeship existed until ‘full’ emancipation on 1 August 1838. See Melanie J. Newton, The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2008).
As Governor of the Windwards, MacGregor was responsible for receiving all correspondence from the Lieutenant Governors of the other islands and selecting the matters to be brought to Colonial Office attention. D.J. Murray, The West Indies and the Development of Colonial Government 1801–1834 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 181.
Richard B. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1680–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 249–53
Kenneth Kiple, The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 144–5.
Larry Stewart, ‘The Edge of Utility: Slaves and Smallpox in the Early Eighteenth Century’, Medical History, 29 (1985), 54–70
B.W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean: 1807–1834 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1995) 278–9
On Mixed Commissions, see Farida Sheikh, ‘Judicial Diplomacy: British Officials and the Mixed Commission Courts’, in Keith Hamiltom and Patrick Salmon (eds), Slavery, Diplomacy and Empire: Britain and the Suppression of the Slave Trade (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2009), 42–64
Leslie Bethell, ‘The Mixed Commission for the Suppression of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of African History, 7:1 (1966), 79–93.
Bonham C. Richardson, ‘Caribbean Migrations, 1838–1985’, in Franklin A. Wright and Colin A. Palmer (eds), The Modern Caribbean (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 203–28
William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, 1830–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 261–71.
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© 2013 Katherine Foxhall
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Foxhall, K. (2013). The Colonial Travels and Travails of Smallpox Vaccine, c.1820–1840. In: Cox, C., Marland, H. (eds) Migration, Health and Ethnicity in the Modern World. Science, Technology and Medicine in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303233_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303233_5
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