Government responsibility for public health shaped the fledgling nation’s concepts of freedom.
Credit: Science History Images/AlamyJohns Hopkins Univ. Press
Onesimus had told his enslaver how people in Africa took material from the pustules of someone with the disease and stabbed it under the skin of others to protect them. This practice, later called variolation, had been used in some parts of the world for centuries, but was not widely embraced by Europeans.
So the process was fundamentally a public affair. As revolutionary sentiment simmered, the colonies cycled through a series of smallpox outbreaks; each city mounted its own response. Wehrman recounts in exhaustive detail the debates and votes in a handful of towns as citizens grappled with when to allow inoculation, who should receive it and how it should be administered. At times, it’s hard to see where this is all heading.
Efforts to launch vaccination campaigns foundered in the face of rampant misinformation, competing business interests and a smallpox-weary public. Outbreaks continued, albeit at a much slower pace than before, and the United States — once a proud leader in smallpox immunizations — slipped behind its counterparts in Europe and beyond. Wehrman flies through this part of his story, but after the three years we’ve just had, it feels so familiar that more detail seems unnecessary.
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