Placing the Public focuses on the human public, and the strand of the project on vaccination is no exception to this. But it is impossible to write a history of immunisation without reference to animals. From the use of cowpox in eighteenth-century experiments on smallpox immunisation to the debates…
The great success story of vaccination in the twentieth century was the eradication of smallpox. Although other public health techniques such as isolation and containment were necessary to eliminate the last few wild cases, vaccination was a key weapon against the disease from the late eighteenth century right up to…
