War Against Smallpox

Michael Bennett is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Tasmania. He is the author of four books on late medieval England and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge.

• List of Figures; List of Abbreviations and Acronyms; Preface and Acknowledgements; 1. A Tale of Two Diseases: Smallpox and Cowpox; 2. Fire with Fire: Smallpox Inoculation in the Eighteenth Century; 3. Good Tidings from the Farm: Jenner and the Cowpox Discovery; 4. National Mobilisation: Vaccination in Britain and Ireland; 5. Vaccine Diaspora: Medical Networks in a World at War; 6. The Vaccine's Conquest of Napoleonic Europe; 7. The Guardian Pox in Northern Europe; 8. Across the Pyrenees: Vaccination in Spain and Portugal; 9. Romanovs and Vaktsinovs: Vaccination in the Russian Empire; 10. Passage through India: Vaccinaton in South Asia; 11. 'This New Inoculation Is No Sham!' Vaccination in North America; 12. A New Pox for the New World. Vaccination in Latin America; 13. Oceanic Vaccine: The World Encircled; 14. The World Arm-to-Arm: Jenner and the Vaccination Revolution; Select Bibliography; Index.

'It's as commonplace as it is true to say that infectious disease knows no borders. In War Against Smallpox, Michael Bennett offers us something immeasurably more intriguing: the border crossing of vaccination. Bennett follows this strange procedure's rapid-fire travels from London to Spain, India, the Cape, the New World, China and beyond. And as if that intercontinental story is not fascinating enough, it all took place either side of 1800, as the global Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars wrenched the world into a new century. A major new global history. The world connected arm-to-arm.' Alison Bashford, University of New South Wales