Contemporary reactions to smallpox inoculation in eighteenth-century France

• Main Author: Davis, Charles Michael
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/21621

The purpose of this study is to examine the medical, religious, and social reactions to smallpox inoculation in French society and to analyze the nature of the controversy and the dominant part played in it by the learned community and medical profession of France as it took shape in the general context of the eighteenth century. The approach has stressed those aspects of the social history of medical ideas and practices and of the social history of contemporary thought which seems to make sense of the important discussions over inoculation. Although strictly speaking the controversy over inoculation did not cease at any point in the eighteenth century, the most important discussions took place between 1714 and 1775. Therefore, the present study will not deal with events after 1775 during which time the practice of inoculation became accepted, though not universally established, in France. It is important to note the period under discussion marked a crucial phase in the history of the Enlightenment in France, for the campaign on behalf of inoculation then assumed many of its special characteristics. Certain key developments occurred which provide the framework of this study. The first is concerned with the safety of the methods and development in their techniques during the course of the eighteenth century which helps to explain the motives and timing for the general acceptance of smallpox inoculation. The second deals with the social, religious, and medical responses to inoculation in the early eighteenth century. The fear that partial inoculations of only some members of the community would spread the natural form of the disease to the rest was the principal reason which accounts for the prohibition of the practice during this period. The third deals with three of the most important aspects of the controversy. Firstly, the growing interest of "enlightened" governmental authorities and medical men to extend the practice to the suffering masses as well as the interrelated measures of public health and hygiene; secondly, the tendency to abandon traditional religious and medical values and to substitute for them a new way of thinking based on probabilistic formulations of comparative mortality rates of inoculated and natural smallpox cases; and thirdly, the relatively high price of inoculation and the reluctance of medical personnel to spread inoculation to the French population as a whole. === Arts, Faculty of === History, Department of === Unknown