The Vaccinators: Smallpox, Medical Knowledge, and the 'Opening' of Japan - Hardcover

Jannetta, Ann Bowman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804754896 ISBN 13: 9780804754897

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

In Japan, as late as the mid-nineteenth century, smallpox claimed the lives of an estimated twenty percent of all children born—most of them before the age of five. When the apathetic Tokugawa shogunate failed to respond, Japanese physicians, learned in Western medicine and medical technology, became the primary disseminators of Jennerian vaccination—a new medical technology to prevent smallpox. Tracing its origins from rural England, Jannetta investigates the transmission of Jennerian vaccination to and throughout pre-Meiji Japan. Relying on Dutch, Japanese, Russian, and English sources, the book treats Japanese physicians as leading agents of social and institutional change, showing how they used traditional strategies involving scholarship, marriage, and adoption to forge new local, national, and international networks in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Vaccinators details the appalling cost of Japan's almost 300-year isolation and examines in depth a nation on the cusp of political and social upheaval.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Ann Jannetta is Professor of History Emerita at the University of Pittsburgh. Her publications include Epidemics and Mortality in Early Modern Japan and "Public Health and the Diffusion of Vaccination in Japan" in What Do We Know about Asian Population History?

Ann Jannetta is Professor of History Emerita at the University of Pittsburgh. Her publications include Epidemics and Mortality in Early Modern Japan and "Public Health and the Diffusion of Vaccination in Japan" in What Do We Know about Asian Population History?

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In Japan, as late as the mid-nineteenth century, smallpox claimed the lives of an estimated twenty percent of all children born—most of them before the age of five. When the apathetic Tokugawa shogunate failed to respond to this health crisis, Japanese physicians, learned in Western medicine and medical technology, became the primary disseminators of Jennerian vaccination—a new medical technology to prevent smallpox. Tracing its origins from rural England, Jannetta investigates the transmission of Jennerian vaccination, via various foreign and domestic networks, to and throughout pre-Meiji Japan. Relying on Dutch, Japanese, Russian, and English sources, the book treats Japanese physicians as leading agents of social and institutional change, showing how they used traditional strategies involving scholarship, marriage, and adoption to forge new local, national, and international networks in the first half of the nineteenth century. With an interesting parallel to the recent SARS crisis, The Vaccinators details the appalling cost of Japan's almost three-hundred-year isolation and examines in depth a nation on the cusp of political and social upheaval.

Aus dem Klappentext

In Japan, as late as the mid-nineteenth century, smallpox claimed the lives of an estimated twenty percent of all children born most of them before the age of five. When the apathetic Tokugawa shogunate failed to respond to this health crisis, Japanese physicians, learned in Western medicine and medical technology, became the primary disseminators of Jennerian vaccination a new medical technology to prevent smallpox. Tracing its origins from rural England, Jannetta investigates the transmission of Jennerian vaccination, via various foreign and domestic networks, to and throughout pre-Meiji Japan. Relying on Dutch, Japanese, Russian, and English sources, the book treats Japanese physicians as leading agents of social and institutional change, showing how they used traditional strategies involving scholarship, marriage, and adoption to forge new local, national, and international networks in the first half of the nineteenth century. With an interesting parallel to the recent SARS crisis, The Vaccinators details the appalling cost of Japan's almost three-hundred-year isolation and examines in depth a nation on the cusp of political and social upheaval.

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The Vaccinators

SMALLPOX, MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE, AND THE 'OPENING' OF JAPANBy Ann Jannetta

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5489-7

Contents

List of Illustrations............................................................................ixList of Tables...................................................................................x1Conventions Used.................................................................................xiiiPreface..........................................................................................xvIntroduction.....................................................................................11. Confronting Smallpox..........................................................................82. Jenner's Cowpox Vaccine.......................................................................253. Engaging the Periphery........................................................................534. The Dutch Connection: Batavia, Nagasaki, and Edo..............................................785. Constructing a Network: The Ranpo Physicians..................................................1026. The Vaccinators...............................................................................1327. Engaging the Center...........................................................................160Conclusion.......................................................................................181Appendix 1. Japanese Names Mentioned in the Text, with Birth and Death Years.....................189Appendix 2. Philipp Franz von Siebold's Students at Narutaki.....................................193Appendix 3. Alphabetized List of Otamagaike Sponsors.............................................195Glossary.........................................................................................197Notes............................................................................................203References.......................................................................................225Index............................................................................................235

Chapter One

Confronting Smallpox

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, smallpox was a force to be reckoned with—a universal disease and the world's most reliable killer. The virus that causes smallpox, Variola major, was a tireless migrant that moved continuously from place to place in search of susceptible human hosts to infect. Because a human host provided only a temporary residence for V. major, the death or recovery of its host meant that the virus had to move on in search of a new one. Hence, the smallpox virus thrived in cities and other places where the number of human hosts was large or where a high birth rate produced new hosts to accommodate the peripatetic virus. In such places, smallpox became an endemic disease that circulated continuously from one susceptible human host to another. World population growth and increases in the number and size of cities eventually created environments in which the smallpox virus could sustain itself indefinitely.

In ancient times, the migrations of the variola virus were contained within separate spheres of contact that connected the great civilizations of the Old World. Human migrations of all sorts—interregional trade, wars, and expansion across frontiers—facilitated the spread of the smallpox virus to populations where smallpox was unknown and where every living person was a susceptible host. A dramatic transmission of the variola virus occurred with the discovery of the Western Hemisphere by Europeans. The human migrations that followed allowed V. major to make a transoceanic leap to the New World, where it found large new populations to infect, and these areas experienced massive depopulation from smallpox. In societies that experienced regular exposure to smallpox, the case-fatality rate was about 25 percent; however, in societies that encountered smallpox infrequently, the rate was much higher. When a high proportion of the population was stricken within a short period of time, few healthy individuals remained to care for large numbers of desperately ill people, and the death rate rose as a result.

In early modern times, as long-distance trade expanded to connect virtually all regions of the world, the smallpox virus was able to establish a global migratory sphere. V. major traveled by land and by sea, a frequent companion of its human host. By the eighteenth century, smallpox had become a universal disease that afflicted societies everywhere. Survivors of smallpox acquired lifetime immunity to the disease; hence, in densely settled populations where smallpox was endemic, it soon became a disease of children. Virtually all living adults were smallpox survivors, many of whom bore the hideous, disfiguring scars that were the telltale mark of the disease. High smallpox mortality rates could check population growth in places where the disease was endemic, but because most adults were immune, smallpox only rarely challenged political and social stability in those places.

By contrast, communities with small, scattered populations that had few contacts with the world's population centers could avoid exposure to smallpox for long periods. However, when the variola virus did strike and a large proportion of the population was infected, the political, social, and demographic effects could be devastating. In addition to virgin populations experiencing smallpox for the first time, nomadic communities and pastoral peoples who moved from place to place on the fringes of settled, agrarian societies were especially vulnerable. They too suffered unusually high mortality rates from smallpox when they came in contact with their more settled neighbors.

As the migratory sphere of V. major expanded and the incidence of smallpox cases increased, smallpox apparently became a more virulent disease. Certainly, seventeenth-century European observers believed that smallpox was a more serious disease than it had been in earlier times. Given the absence of case-fatality statistics, it is not possible to confirm this observation, but the annual bills of mortality for London, which began to be published in 1629, indicate that smallpox was already a major cause of death and increasingly caused a larger proportion of all deaths. This trend was observed in the eighteenth century as well. Genevieve Miller has referred to smallpox as "a formidable new scourge" that was "taking the place of old enemies like the plague...." It was common wisdom not to count one's children until they had survived smallpox.

What could be done? Apart from invoking divine protection, the time-honored methods of combatting smallpox were flight and isolation. But however effective these methods might be in the short run, where smallpox was endemic, they only postponed the inevitable. With the knowledge that exposure to smallpox was virtually certain, that no effective treatment existed, and that death or disfigurement were likely outcomes, two options presented themselves: to wait for smallpox to strike and hope for the best, or to deliberately expose one's children to smallpox under the most favorable circumstances possible. Interest in the latter option led to experimentation with a variety of techniques known as variolation. Before either the term or the concept of immunization had been formulated, variolation techniques were granting lifelong immunity to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804754896
• ISBN 13: 9780804754897
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 264
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland