In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Vaccination

  • Introduction
  • Recent History of Vaccination
  • Reference Works
  • Anthologies
  • Production
  • Eradication
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History of Medicine Vaccination
by
Elena Conis
  • LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780197768723-0040

Introduction

Vaccines are medical technologies that prompt the human immune system to produce specific types of cells that recognize pathogens, have the capacity to destroy them, and remain in the body for an extended period of time. The first vaccine, against smallpox (variola virus), consisted of pus (fresh or dried) taken from cattle infected with cowpox (vaccinia virus). In humans, cowpox infection stimulates immune cells to make antibodies against cowpox, which also protect against smallpox. The discovery that cowpox protected against smallpox marked a revolutionary moment in medicine, because it represented an unprecedented means of protecting individuals from a longstanding disfiguring, disabling, and highly fatal infection, and in public health because it presented a means of protecting communities from outbreaks. The possibility of safeguarding an entire municipality or nation-state led to 19th-century edicts making vaccination compulsory in Europe and, later, the United States. Smallpox vaccination, which began at the end of the eighteenth century, was practiced for decades before scientific developments in western Europe led to the rise of bacteriology and the germ theory of disease. The identification of specific microbes capable of causing illness in humans and animals led to the development of a subsequent generation of vaccines in the late nineteenth century, against such diseases as anthrax and rabies. Roughly concurrently, anti-vaccination movements took shape in Western Europe and the United States, organizing objection to compulsory human vaccination against smallpox. In the early twentieth century, scientists developed a handful of new, effective vaccines for humans, against diseases including diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, tuberculosis, and yellow fever. After the Second World War, yet another wave of vaccines became available, against polio, measles, mumps, rubella, and influenza, and vaccines became cornerstones for national and global disease eradication efforts. Smallpox, one such target, was eradicated in 1980. The following decades saw the advent of new vaccines developed via biotechnology; a growing global vaccine market; a resurgence of vaccination resistance movements globally; and a boom in historical, sociological, anthropological, and other studies of the history of vaccines and vaccination. The English-language historiography is dominated by literature focused on smallpox, its vaccine, the physician credited with the vaccine’s development (Edward Jenner), laws and regulations governing the vaccine’s use, and, finally, the use of vaccination to achieve smallpox eradication. In this literature, hagiographies abound. Historical literature attending to dozens of other vaccines, as well as vaccine targets (human, animal, and microbial), technologies, production, practitioners, policies, politics, and reception, including the phenomenon long known as anti-vaccinationism, has accelerated in recent decades. This literature is the focus of this article, which is not exhaustive. It organizes the literature around the “life cycle” of the vaccine, from original conceptualization to use in eradication efforts, focusing on human vaccination against infectious disease, even though many other types of vaccines are in use or in research and development.

Beginnings

As noted in the Introduction, vaccination began with the development of smallpox vaccine, generally credited to English country physician Edward Jenner (b. 1749–d. 1823), who published a treatise based on his vaccination experiments in 1798. For centuries prior to the development of vaccination, communities across the globe practiced inoculation, also known as variolation, in which pus, dried scabs, or other material from a person with an active case of smallpox was deliberately administered to a healthy person to induce a case of the disease. The practice, which was based on observations that a smallpox survivor never suffers the disease again, traces back in East Asian and African sources roughly a millennium ago. The literature on inoculation explores its global origins, motivations for its deployment in different cultural and political contexts, and reception in communities to whom it was introduced. The literature on vaccination’s beginnings covers the advent of smallpox vaccination and its use by states and empires in the early nineteenth century, as well as individuals’ reception of the practice in widely divergent political and cultural contexts.

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