The Vaccinators : Smallpox, Medical Knowledge, and the ‘Opening’ of Japan

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. "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 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." --Book Jacket. In Japan, as late as the mid-nineteenth century, smallpox claimed the lives of an estimated twenty percent of all children bornmost 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 vaccinationa 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. 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 political and social upheaval