Vaccinators

By the mid-nineteenth century, when Japan was still largely closed to the West, smallpox epidemics had killed an estimated ten percent of the Japanese population. 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.