Smallpox in Two Systems of Knowledge

Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 2012

Elizabeth Christin, 2025

This dissertation explores the historical experiences of public health in the princely state of Travancore, focusing on the spread and management of smallpox after the Second World War. The research critically examines how the war indirectly contributed to the resurgence and transmission of smallpox in the region. Central to this study is the interplay between colonial public health interventions and indigenous religious beliefs. While Edward Jenner's pioneering work in England led to the development of the smallpox vaccine using cowpox, its acceptance and implementation in princely states like Travancore faced sociocultural resistance. In Travancore, the local population often turned to religious beliefs and deities for healing, rather than embracing Western medicine. The emergence of smallpox-related deities reflects the deep-rooted spiritual responses to the epidemic. By using smallpox as a case study, this research highlights the broader tension between scientific medical practices and traditional religious responses in colonial India. The relevance of this historical analysis extends to the contemporary context of the COVID-19 pandemic, where modern societies, despite medical advancements, continue to witness a reliance on religious and traditional practices alongside scientific responses. This study thus bridges past and present, offering insights into the socio-cultural dimensions of disease, faith, and public health.

Bulletin of The History of Medicine, 2009

cristian a b a s t o s summary: In this article I will address colonial state policies toward smallpox in nineteenth-century Goa. The picture that emerges from the analysis of health services documents suggests a broad variety of coexisting practices. While the actions of some of the Portuguese head physicians epitomized the conflict between statesponsored vaccination policies and local preferences for smallpox inoculation, others showed sympathy for and developed arguments in favor of inoculation as practiced by indigenous experts. Still others observed the existence among the population of hybrid practices combining elements of vaccination and inoculation. The diversity of Goan combinations along the violence/collaboration continuum should be interpreted within the context of current trends in the analysis of smallpox in British India-which replace the paradigm of vaccination : variolation :: state violence : native resistance with a more nuanced understanding of a variety of combinations throughout the subcontinent in the nineteenth century.

Asian Medicine, 2008

INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCES AND EDUCATION JOURNAL ( ISSEJ ), 2025

Variola virus causes smallpox characterized by debilitating scarring, pustules, and deaths with a mortality rate of 30%. It has shaped the trajectory of kingdoms, cultures, and economies. It has ravaged mankind for 3000 years and was responsible for over 300million deaths globally in the 20th century. In 1980, smallpox became the only human disease eradicated through widespread vaccination. It is an innovative adaptation of the epic discovery of Dr. Edward Jenner's cowpox vaccine in 1798. In most colonies, smallpox campaigns were marked by local resistance, negotiation before final acceptance. Thus, this historical research highlights the role of Indigenous vaccinators during smallpox campaigns and their engagement with local populations in early 20th-century Punjab. By deploying archival sources from Punjab Archives and Punjab Central Library, this piece discovered that some Indigenous vaccinators exhibited unprofessional conduct, which contributed to local resistance to vaccinations and shaped outcomes of smallpox vaccinations in early twentieth-century Punjab. This study highlights the intersection between vaccination procedures and vaccinators in the context of endemic and epidemic management. This research could help to assess and critique the contemporary vaccination procedures and processes to enhance efficient and effective disease management and prevention.

Autour des poppulations du passé: approches sanitaires

We are looking at the implementation of a plan to prevent what used to be catastrophic epidemics of smallpox, first through inoculation, then through vaccination. We examine the objections and resistance to these methods.

2013

The transition from miasma to germ theory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century has been widely documented in narratives about the discovery of microbes, the evidence of contamination, or the procedures for sterilizations. This was a radical change in the history of understanding disease, treating and preventing it, and that shift marked a new era in medicine. However, it is important to find out how did that shift happen, what was it actually like to live through the transition while dealing with the disease, contagion, infection, transmission, treatment or prevention? This project was aimed to investigate the establishment of germ theory as the central paradigm in tropical medicine and the impact of germ theory on the indigenous physicians in colonial India. The study consists of the five following chapters:

Medical History, 2013

The idea that smallpox could be eradicated was not necessarily the ultimate aim when inoculation was introduced in Europe in the 1720s. This potentiality was not clearly articulated as an aim until the end of the eighteenth century. This article argues that during most of the eighteenth century, the main aim of inoculation was to lead people as safely as possible through what was regarded as an unavoidable disease. Inoculation became safer, simpler and less expensive from the 1760s, but the changing ideas about its potentiality had more complex roots. A new understanding was produced through an interaction between inoculation practice, more general medical theory and developments within probabilistic thinking and political arithmetic. The first part of the article explores how smallpox inoculation was incorporated into existing medical thinking based on traditional humoral pathology. Inoculation was a new technology, but as it was perceived in the early eighteenth century, the innovation did not first and foremost concern the medical principles of the treatment. The second part of the article investigates arguments about why and when to inoculate: what kind of remedy was inoculation for eighteenth-century agents? The article concludes with a discussion on changes emerging towards the end of the century, and relates them to developments during the preceding decades rather than seeing them as inspired precursors of events and ideas to come.

Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2015

Sir Hans Sloane's account of inoculation as a means to protect against smallpox followed several earlier articles published in Philosophical Transactions on this procedure. Inoculation (also called 'variolation') involved the introduction of small amounts of infectious material from smallpox vesicles into the skin of healthy subjects, with the goal of inducing mild symptoms that would result in protection against the more severe naturally acquired disease. It began to be practised in England in 1721 thanks to the efforts of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu who influenced Sloane to promote its use, including the inoculation of the royal family's children. When Edward Jenner's inoculation with the cow pox ('vaccination') followed 75 years later as a safer yet equally effective procedure, the scene was set for the eventual control of smallpox epidemics culminating in the worldwide eradication of smallpox in 1977, officially proclaimed by WHO in 1980. Here, we discu...