Michael Bennett. War against Smallpox

Michael Bennett’s War against Smallpox: Edward Jenner and the Global Spread of Vaccination is an exhaustive, ambitious, and comprehensive work that promises to be a useful starting point for the many historical inquiries into vaccination that our present moment is likely to inspire. As the title suggests, the narrative follows the world’s first vaccine, against smallpox, from its documented discovery by Edward Jenner in the 1790s through its spread around the globe in the first decades of the nineteenth century, tracking its arrival and adoption on every continent save Africa and Antarctica. The book’s vast scope and starting point, however, are both its strengths and its weaknesses. Bennett’s study begins with chronologically far-reaching descriptions of the appearance, nature, and spread of smallpox and cowpox—the virus from which smallpox vaccine was ultimately made—and the practice of inoculation—deliberate infection with mild smallpox as a means of protection against more severe forms of the disease. For Bennett, inoculation in Europe and especially Britain—it was, as he notes, practiced all over the world—made it possible for the observant British country doctor Jenner to demonstrate that cowpox infection protected against smallpox disease without causing disease, as inoculation did. From Jenner’s hometown of Berkeley, Gloucestershire, Bennett tracks the spread of both the idea of vaccination and the vaccine matter itself through Britain and its empire, France and the French Empire, northern Europe, the Iberian Peninsula, the Russian Empire, South Asia, North America, Latin America, and Oceania.

Cowpox · Globe · Latin Americans · Narrative · Politics · Smallpox · Smallpox vaccine · Vaccination · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · History of Science and Medicine · Yersinia bacterium, plague, ectoparasites research