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This chapter considers the changes taking place in preventive medicine in the army and in civilian life in the run up to the First World War. It shows how various elements of preventive medicine were enmeshed with emergent notions of citizenship and ideas of masculinity and morality. It begins by examining various aspects of sanitation and hygiene from the battlefield and the trenches, through to hygienic education and relations with civilians and imperial labour corps. It then moves on to consider inoculation against typhoid — the disease which claimed so many lives during the South African War — and the army's fight against those who were opposed to the measure on grounds of principle. It ends by looking at the problem of venereal disease in France and Belgium and the awkward political compromises into which the army was forced when dealing with it.

While Lady Mary's Turkish adventures dropped behind her, new and problematic adventures awaited. Nicolas–Francois Rémond, whom she had met in Paris in 1718, had been pursuing her ever since. Rémond wrote as an anglophile of English politics, literature, and theatre, and as a virtuoso of ancient and modern literature and the respective merits of rhyme and blank verse. In May 1720, as the South Sea boom was gathering steam, Rémond arrived in London to make her ‘a visit, against my will’. Though Lady Mary had survived herself and protected her son, smallpox remained ever threatening. On her return from Turkey she also found ‘a veritable smallpox war’—about treatment, not prevention—being waged among doctors.

Lady Mary's days of exotic journeys seemed far away. Now her trips were short and sober. In the London area she visited Lord Ilay's Kenwood House, with Lady Oxford, and the spa at Islington, with young Mary. Her heroic battle for inoculation surfaced in memory from time to time, often with pain and regret, when some child died after the operation. Lady Mary was firmly committed to the gentle methods which she had seen practised in Turkey, and opposed to the more draconian English approach. The family deaths of the 1720s were succeeded in the 1730s by deaths of friends.

This chapter illustrates the complicated relations between colonialism, medicine, and the production of knowledge about gender, through the specific problem of inoculation versus vaccination, an ongoing medical and governmental problem throughout the 18th and 20th centuries.

This chapter examines the interlinked histories of inoculation and print during the 1721 Boston inoculation controversy. Cotton Mather claimed that he learned about inoculation from his slave Onesimus, and he advocated for it as a treatment during smallpox epidemics. Following the lead of William Douglass, anti-inoculists engaged Mather and his supporters in a wide-ranging exchange that Perry Miller eventually dismissed as a “tiff about style.” While the controversy initially focused on the procedure’s effectiveness and safety, it quickly devolved into an exchange of satires and parodies of opposing viewpoints. This chapter investigates the formal and stylistic concerns at the heart of the controversy, and reveals how these rely on representations of Native Americans and Africans, who unwittingly became vehicles for medical arguments. The formal qualities of African speech took on epistemological significance, and were held up as proof of the relative truth and falsity of scientific evidence. The positioning of Africans in the debate engages modern assumptions about the liberalizing tendencies of eighteenth-century medicine and print culture, underscoring the exclusionary practices that mark those Africans as the objects—rather than subjects—of liberalism.

This chapter assesses the influence of horror upon its audience. Does continued exposure to images of violence and sustained threat influence and corrupt audiences? Interestingly, the SAW films, or at least their marketing campaigns, would seem to subscribe to the passive 'inoculation' audience theory. The 'inoculation' hypothesis, or 'drip drip' theory, argues that continued exposure to violent images desensitises the audience, necessitating more extreme imagery in order to receive the requisite shock gratification. Each SAW movie certainly attempts to outdo its predecessor in terms of imaginative gore. The series' marketing keys into this accumulative demand, in a sense postulating each film's Unique Selling Proposition (USP) as an increase in novel gore.

There is a long history of the study of Bordetella species in animal hosts, built on the foundation of Koch’s postulates: experimentally inoculating animals with virulent bacteria to define various pathogenic outcomes. Inoculation of mice, rats, pigs, baboons, and humans simulate whooping cough with increasing accuracy, albeit with exponentially increasing costs and difficulties. While most of the basic processes of immune activation and pathogenesis are quite similar from rodents to primates, relative to other pathogen infection systems there are marked differences that are important to consider. While most of this work has involved B. pertussis, the closely related species B. bronchiseptica naturally, and highly efficiently, infects a variety of animals, allowing aspects of pathogenesis to be examined in the context of natural infections. More recently, the ongoing transmission of B. pertussis within highly vaccinated populations has increased interest in understanding the nature of the transmission process. Several innovative animal models have now been established that allow transmission of B. bronchiseptica among mice, rabbits, and pigs, and transmission of B. pertussis among baboons. Together, these animal model systems have taught us most of what we know of the nature of the complex interactions within an individual host, transmission between hosts, and the past and ongoing evolution of these species. Recent and ongoing improvements of the historical animal infection systems, and the generation of new experimental infection systems to study pathogenesis and transmission, are critical to advance our understanding and control of the resurgence of this highly infectious disease.

In this chapter, Gioia Angeletti examines Byron’s letters to his British correspondents and his journals from the Italian years in order to throw into relief their ‘ethnographic observation of the human and cultural geography of Italy’. Insisting on the contingent reality of the country, rather than an idealised ‘Italy’, these documents show Byron as a cultural mediator between Italy and Britain as he immerses himself in, and offers an insider’s view of, the country’s quotidian life, its ‘anthropological and ethnographic marginalia or minutiae’. However, this chapter also indicates that Byron’s letters home perform a delicate balancing act between immersion and difference, as he retains his Britishness even as he acquires Italianness – an Anglo-Italian doubleness that is a recurrent feature in his more specifically literary writings, too.

At the end of the century the viceregal government mandated anticontagion measures for communities and households affected by infectious disease. Finally implemented in 1796 and 1797 with the arrival of another epidemic of smallpox, the regime occasioned radical experiments in disease management and a turn to new medical paradigms of prevention. Judicial inquiries, administrative correspondence, and legal briefs and petitions filed by guilds, village leaders, religious orders, and administrators conveyed the complaints and perspectives of peasants, artisans, merchants, priests, and district governors as they struggled over disease management in the intendancy of Oaxaca. Following months of social unrest, the viceregal government confirmed the technological shift already under way in rural villages by endorsing inoculation’s widespread use.

Historians of science observe that new technologies must be “domesticated” before they work. Drawing on these insights, this chapter shows how immunization was first introduced in medical treatises, sermons, pastoral letters, legal briefs, and public ceremonies, as physicians, bishops, governors, and ministers aimed to convince parents and other caretakers of its value. These colonial genres and rituals, and eventually gifts of coins and cookies to entice parents and children, rendered preventive medicine safe, efficacious, and sacred for diverse publics and paved the way for the Royal Philanthropic Vaccination Expedition’s introduction of Edward Jenner’s cowpox vaccine.

This chapter traces the experience of the South African War on the later life and work of Arthur Conan Doyle, charting his agitation for military reform and for preventive health measures, especially for typhoid inoculation to be mandatory in the armed forces. It shows him defending the behavior and actions of the British troops in South Africa, and follows his involvement in various causes: the miscarriage of justice in the Edalji case; the Congo Reform Association, for which he wrote The Crime of the Congo; and his increasing proselytizing for spiritualism, in which he was encouraged by his second wife. This chapter argues that Doyle’s real achievements, as well as what he hoped to be remembered for, are overshadowed by the extraordinary vitality and adaptability of his fictional creation Sherlock Holmes.

This chapter explores the practice of Suttonian inoculation in America. In Britain, there were not really any challenges to the Suttons' claim of their inoculation method's originality. However, most of those who practised the new method in Britain were members of the Sutton family or practitioners who were credited, having bought the Sutton seal of approval. Not many tried their luck abroad. In particular, there seemed to be little incentive to set up in practice in the American colonies. Smallpox inoculation had been pioneered in Boston in 1721, the same year as the Newgate trial in London. In some of the thirteen counties of colonial America it had been banned altogether, in others it had been practised with considerable success. Why cross the Atlantic for such an unpromising venture? One who did was James Latham, an army sergeant who, before he was posted to Quebec with the threat of revolution growing in the colonies to the south, had got himself accredited as a Suttonian inoculator.

This chapter recounts how, once he had moved out of Sutton House, Daniel Sutton became itinerant, moving from one West End street to another in quick succession. In 1779, he announced that he had been 'engaged by the Governors of the General Inoculation Dispensary' and he had moved nearby to Southampton Street in Bloomsbury. Although he was still inoculating on his own account on his usual terms of 10 guineas, to have any kind of official post was out of character. Times had changed and he made it clear in yet another newspaper advertisement that he was well aware of the waning of his celebrity. Announcing his appointment to the dispensary, he felt it necessary to plead that he was the 'identical person who, in 1767 (by royal approbation) was complimented with a grant of the following honorary Patent for his singular and new method of inoculation'. This method, he claimed, was now 'very materially improved'. Once again the family coat of arms awarded to himself and his family was evoked. The chapter then looks at the publication in 1796 of Daniel's account of his discoveries as an inoculator.

This chapter assesses whether Edward Jenner would have discovered the protective power of cowpox even if there had been no inoculation before vaccination. In his account of how he made his discovery, Jenner attributes it directly to his experiences as an inoculator. All the histories Jenner presented to support his case for vaccine inoculation could not have been performed without Suttonian inoculation. And when Jenner came to attempt his first practical experiment with the vaccine, he was already an experienced Suttonian inoculator. He believed the key to Sutton's success was the manner of inserting the infective matter with the lancet barely breaking the skin or drawing blood. That is how he chose to perform his first vaccination.

This chapter considers Julia Kristeva's writings on melancholia, bringing together her earlier engagement with individual melancholia in Black Sun as well as her more recent discussions of national depression and the “new maladies of the soul.” Kristeva examines the high incidence of depression and argues in the Black Sun that many intellectuals, writers, and artists have successfully emerged from or at least achieved an ability to live with melancholia—an ailment that otherwise often results in being incapacitated to express symbolically. Furthermore, these artists succeeded in combating melancholia through the very act of melancholic writing or creating. This act of treating a potentially debilitating psychic ailment with a smaller, less lethal dose of the same affliction is called “spiritual inoculation.”

This chapter follows the career of the Boston physician William Douglass, whose closely related ideas about colonial medicine, natural history, and commerce made him the foremost critic of paper money in New England. A member of the network of Scottish expatriates who played key roles in administering the British colonies, Douglass made his reputation as the leading opponent of smallpox inoculation and folk medicine provided by ministers, midwives, and unlicensed healers in the 1720s. But he made his fortune by lending money and speculating in real estate, while becoming a noted naturalist and political polemicist. The keynotes of his work were his linked theories of contagion, classification, and credit, in which Douglass sought to establish the authority of cosmopolitan elites such as university-trained physicians and transatlantic traders over freehold farmers and provincial pastors. Informed by the fertile concept of circulation, which received its classic exposition from the English physiologist William Harvey, Douglass drew the contours of his critique of paper currency and the “land bank” movement in the 1740s. Escalating issues of public bills of credit and low-interest public loans, he argued, substituted an artificial medium contrived by indigent debtors for the natural silver specie of responsible merchants and creditors.

This chapter examines how sporadic epidemics raged anew among the descendants of Old World people and continued among the Indians who had remained untouched by earlier incursions. Smallpox had been one of the many endemic diseases in Europe for centuries, but it became more virulent in the early sixteenth century. It took a deadly toll of its victims, a fearful situation that continued into the eighteenth century and wreaked havoc among the Native Americans for 200 years. Over time Europeans had observed that mortality among children, except for infants, was not as great as that for adults and that their symptoms were not as devastating even when it was at its most virulent. In 1721, a smallpox epidemic spread in Boston, causing deaths as high as 20 percent of the population, and marking the beginning of a new era in medicine brought on by Cotton Mather. Mather, a Puritan minister, promoted a smallpox inoculation procedure that he learned from his African slave.