Extract

Public health has, historically, taken many forms—whether quarantine measures of Renaissance Italian city-states, or nineteenth-century urban sanitation reform. In The Contagion of Liberty, Andrew M. Wehrman focuses on smallpox inoculation, weaving it into the fiery political debates in the American colonies in the second half of the eighteenth century.

The only human disease ever eradicated, smallpox was highly feared and caused repeated epidemics throughout the eighteenth century. While today we are familiar with vaccination (which uses modified, noninfectious virus material), smallpox inoculation is the purposeful infection of a patient with actual smallpox to produce a hopefully mild and controlled case of the disease. Since surviving smallpox grants lifelong immunity, inoculated individuals were protected from future infections. Given the limits of prelaboratory medicine, patients could never be certain that they were being inoculated with a “mild” case, yet inoculation provided an effective—albeit risky and dangerously contagious—form of preventative medicine, especially in the face of a hazardous epidemic.

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