Care, welfare, and treason: The advent of vaccination in the 19th century

Abstract

This paper attempts to reconstruct the debate that marked the advent of vaccination in the 19th century. Having to contend with the ongoing practice of variolation, backed by professional variolators and a presiding deity, advocates of vaccination sought to portray the practice as a form of treason that needed to be outlawed on the ground that it provoked epidemics and hence was a public threat. The paper recasts the encounter by arguing that the preference for variolation may actually have been based on the continuous failure of vaccination, making it a risky venture for individual patients. Variolation, on the contrary, invariably 'took', and as part of a therapeutics ensured individual care and safe passage to patients. In the light of this, the paper examines the record of vaccination practices in the 19th century. Proffered with fanfare under the sign of individual safety and public welfare, the reach of vaccination was limited. But the rhetoric that sustained it was clearly constitutive of both a European self and a state in the making. As the prototype prophylactic it heralded the insinuation of the state between variolators and their erstwhile clients: a sign of the state's attempt to appropriate the right to be the sole addressee between state and citizen. More fundamentally, it was constitutive of the very terms 'state' and 'citizen', and their mutual relations.