"In Japan, as late as the mid-nineteenth century, smallpox claimed the lives of an estimated 20 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 West…
"In Japan, as late as the mid-nineteenth century, smallpox claimed the lives of an estimated 20 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 West…
By the mid-19th century, when Japan was still largely closed to the West, smallpox epidemics had killed an estimated ten percent of the Japanese population. This text details the appalling cost of Japan's almost 300 year isolation and examines in depth a nation on the cusp of po…
The first complete history of a major human disease from its origins some 3000 years ago to its deliberate extinction in the very recent past. Smallpox inspired a progression of key advances in medical knowledge--from the seminal discovery of vaccination to the concepts of conta…
Michael Bennett provides the first history of the global spread of vaccination during the Napoleonic Wars, offering a new assessment of the cowpox discovery and Edward Jenner's achievement in making cowpox inoculation a viable and universally available practice. He explores the …
"This is the global history of early vaccination. In the late eighteenth century, Jenner demonstrated that inoculating cowpox could be an effective and viable means of preventing smallpox and, by using humanised cowpox (vaccine) drawn from children subject to the procedure, hit …