Smallpox Inoculation. An Eighteenth Century Mathematical Controversy.

1972 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 517
Author(s):  
P. E. Razzell ◽  
L. Bradley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Smallpox Inoculation

The Growth of Population in Eighteenth-Century England: A Critical Reappraisal

1993 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 743-771 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Razzell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Population Growth ◽  
Socioeconomic Groups ◽  
Brick And Tile ◽  
Smallpox Inoculation ◽  
Major Reduction ◽  
Major Hypothesis

Population growth in eighteenth-century England was due mainly to a fall in mortality, which was particularly marked during the first half of the century. The fall affected all socioeconomic groups and does not appear to have occurred for primarily economic reasons. In addition to an explanation involving the introduction of smallpox inoculation, the major hypothesis considered in this article is that the significant improvement in domestic hygiene associated with the rebuilding of housing in brick and tile brought about a major reduction in mortality.

‘We could not answer to ourselves not doing it’: maternal obligations and knowledge of smallpox inoculation in eighteenth-century elite society

2019 ◽  
Vol 92 (258) ◽  
pp. 754-770 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Esfandiary
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Disease Management ◽  
English Version ◽  
Live Virus ◽  
Humoral Medicine ◽  
Smallpox Inoculation ◽  
Modern Sense ◽  
The Way

Abstract Most often depicted as the precursor to the much simpler and safer practice of Jennerian cowpox vaccination, the eighteenth-century practice of inoculating against smallpox with the live virus reveals much about the way in which pre-modern mothers and medics understood and made decisions about disease management in children. Examined from the perspective of those mothers who ultimately sanctioned its use and helped to advance the practice on English soil, despite a complex set of possible eventualities - from uncertain conferral of immunity to death - this article argues that provided an ‘English’ version of it was carried out in strict accordance with the age-old doctrines of humoral medicine, mothers deemed it an entirely rational act devoid of ‘risk’ in our modern sense. These findings run counter to established narratives asserting blanket professionalization and medicalization of childcare during this period, and they nuance the role Lady Mary Wortley Montagu played in introducing the practice she had encountered in Turkey.

'I Think it Highly Necessary to Have it Done Before They Go Out into the World': Inoculation, Responsibility and Patterns of Familial Transmission of Smallpox

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Leadbeater
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Familial Transmission ◽  
The World ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Smallpox Inoculation

This paper examines two research streams. First, it will discuss some contemporary familial perspectives on smallpox inoculation in the eighteenth century. This is followed by a look at the level of provision of the practice in Oxfordshire and some of its contiguous counties. Second, the paper will present some findings on the nature of the transmission of smallpox during local early eighteenth century epidemics in Banbury, Oxfordshire and Aynho, Northamptonshire. Finally, the paper will put forward some conclusions which encompass these two streams.

Advocating Inoculation in the Eighteenth Century: Exemplarity and Quantification

2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Eriksen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mass Treatment ◽  
Inoculation Methods ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Smallpox Inoculation

ArgumentSmallpox inoculation was introduced in Europe in the early eighteenth century and has been considered the first mass treatment of disease based on practical use of probability calculations and mathematical tools of computation. The article argues that these new approaches were deeply entangled with other rationalities, most emphatically that of exemplarity. Changes in inoculation methods around mid-century gradually changed the conceptualization of disease, seeing all cases as fundamentally equal, and thus making it more relevant to count them. Arithmetic changed the ways of thinking about smallpox epidemics, but new ways of conceptualizing disease were vital to making it a matter of arithmetic at all. The article investigates what happened when numbers and figures were introduced into medical matters: Who did the figures really concern, and what types of argument were they fitted into? How were numbers transformed into metaphors, and how did quantitative argument work together with arguments from exemplarity?

From Nature’s Urn to the Insurance Office

2020 ◽  
pp. 75-93
Author(s):  
Theodore M. Porter
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Life Table ◽  
Life Insurance ◽  
Population Estimates ◽  
Degrees Of Belief ◽  
Rich Variety ◽  
Imperfect Knowledge ◽  
Smallpox Inoculation

This chapter examines probability, which, during the eighteenth century, was customarily interpreted as the calculus of reasonableness for a world of imperfect knowledge. Enlightenment thinkers applied the mathematics of chance to an implausibly rich variety of issues. They used it to demonstrate the rationality of smallpox inoculation, to show how degrees of belief should be apportioned among testimonies of various sorts, and even to establish or preclude the wisdom of belief in biblical miracles. Probabilists also stressed the applicability of their subject to actuarial and demographic matters. Probability calculations based on mortality records had been used increasingly to set rates for life insurance and annuity purchases since Edmond Halley published the first life table in 1693. Mathematicians all over Europe, but especially in the great commercial states, the Netherlands and Great Britain, applied their skill to political arithmetic during the eighteenth century. Meanwhile, some of mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace's most important contributions arose from his work on population estimates and other demographic problems.

Preparing for the Pox: A Theory of Smallpox in Bengal and Britain

2003 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 304-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harish Naraindas
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
Medical Theory ◽  
Smallpox Inoculation

This essay is to be conceived in two parts. The first part is an exegesis of an eighteenth-century tract on the practice of smallpox inoculation in Bengal written by a Scottish medic. Cited repeatedly in the contemporary history and anthropology of smallpox in India, it has been invariably used to highlight the technique of inoculation in eighteenth-century India. Caught in disciplinary cleaving between anthropology and history, its original import has not been addressed. The exegesis in restoring the text to its intended import, argues that it offers a theory of smallpox, and in this theory the technique of inoculation is a moment in larger therapeutics. The latter-day privileging of this moment has resulted in seeing the nineteenth-century as a standoff between variolation (smallpox inoculation) and vaccination. The exegesis, however, recasts this as a passage from a therapeutics to a pure prophylactics that caccination represents. Having restored what I think is the central concern of the essay, I then begin to ask whether the essay is actually about the manner of inoculating for the smallpox in Bengal as Holwell says it is or is it actually about its practice in Britain. It is this very restoration, when we locate the essay in 18th century Britain, that allows us, in the latter part of the essay, to to see that not only is the theoretical articulation "induced" by his audience, but also every detail of the description of the practice , which has hitherto been seen as a description determined by his experience in India, is equally induced and determined by his location in Britain . While this could lead me to argue that Holwell's essay has nothing to do with India, I suggest that what the text effects, if not represents, is a kind of translation : one that is both possible and enabled by the fact that the kind of medical theory and practice that underlies disease and its cure is similar - not identical - in India and Britain.

Unaccountable Subjects: Contracting Legal and Medical Authority in the Newgate Smallpox Experiment (1721)

2019 ◽  
Vol 89 ◽  
pp. 22-44
Author(s):  
Spencer J Weinreich
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Medical Authority ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
Experimental Trials ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Smallpox Inoculation

Abstract The first experimental trials of smallpox inoculation were conducted on a group of prisoners in London’s Newgate Prison in 1721. These inmates were long believed to have been facing execution, but archival material reveals that they had in fact received pardons conditional on penal transportation to the Americas. This article rereads the design, progress, and reception of the experiment, reorienting the narrative around the prisoners, their agency, and the legal mechanisms of transportation and pardon. In that light the experiment reflects the dynamics of eighteenth-century governance and punishment: a relatively weak state’s reliance on contractors and deputies (whether to transport convicts or to conduct experiments), on the tacit co-operation of those below, and on the rhetorical management of its actions. Forced to accord the Newgate prisoners a measure of autonomy, the physicians and their royal backers faced a constant struggle to manage their subjects’ participation and to control the experiment’s meaning amid fierce controversy that ranged far beyond inoculation. The Newgate cohort reveals a basic identity between the medical subject and the political subject, but also highlights the fragility of such scripts, regardless of the political, economic, and cultural apparatus brought to bear.

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