The Vaccinators Smallpox, Medical Knoledge, and the Opening of Japan [Hardcover]

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, 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 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 Vaccinatorsdetails 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 her new study, Professor Jannetta traces Edward Jenner's discovery of cowpox vaccination in rural England in 1798 to the primary role Japanese ranpo (Dutch, or Western methods) physicians played in institutionalizing medical knowledge by tirelessly promoting Jennerian vaccination to prevent smallpox. This is a deftly written and argued work on an important public health topic of nineteenth-century Japan, combined with a transnational examination of diffusing medical knowledge of one of the world's major epidemic diseases. Ann Jannetta is Professor of History Emerita at the University of Pittsburgh. Her publications includeEpidemics and Mortality in Early Modern Japanand Public Health and the Diffusion of Vaccination in Japan inWhat Do We Know about Asian Population History? Jannetta's narrative is genuinely engaging, and it is enriched by her use of primary sources in multiple languages . . . She delves deeply intl³e