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

Ann Jannetta

ISBN 10: 0804786909 / ISBN 13: 9780804786904

Published by Stanford University Press, 2007

About this Item

2012. 1st Edition. Paperback. . . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9780804786904

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Vaccinators: Smallpox, Medical Knowledge, and the ?Opening? of Japan
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804786909
• ISBN 13: 9780804786904
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Ann Jannetta is Professor of History Emerita at the University of Pittsburgh. Her publications include Epidemics and Mortality in Early Modern Japan and "Public Health and the Diffusion of Vaccination in Japan" in What Do We Know about Asian Population History?