|
COPYRIGHT 2000 Boston University
IN 1798, BRITAIN WAS PREPARING FOR INVASION BY FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY armies. To the government and the press it seemed ill-prepared to defend itself. The navy had recently mutinied at Spithead and the Nore, and pro-French radicals were fomenting discontent amongst the laboring classes. Worse still, France was threatening Britain's colonies in the East and West Indies. Faced with the exigencies of national politics and imperial war, the established powers in London found little opportunity to pay attention to what turned out to be the most significant event of that year--the quiet appearance in print of a medical treatise entitled An Inquiry into The Causes and Effects of The Variolae Vaccinae, A Disease Discovered in Some of the Western Counties of England ... and known by the name of The Cow Pox.(1) This revolutionary work by Edward Jenner, a little-known provincial doctor, outlined the first ever theory of vaccination, making the eventual global eradication of smallpox possible.(2)
Jenner's Inquiry was beautiful in its simplicity. It was not rooted in visions of national and international conquest of disease, but in the bodies of those who worked in the English countryside. It was not about global politics but about rural health. It was not derived from scientific authorities but from the oral tradition of Gloucestershire villagers. Just over seventy pages in length, it presented a series of stories about dairy maids, farm hands, paupers, and man servants whose daily, pastoral, activities brought them in touch with cows and cowpox, and thus made them immune to smallpox. The most important case was that of dairymaid Sarah Nelmes. "Infected with the cow-pox from her master's cows," Nelmes's pustulised hand provided the infected matter for Jenner's most crucial experiment. He inserted Nelmes's cowpox into the arm of a "healthy boy, about eight years old" (An Inquiry 153). The boy, he discovered, barely took sick and was thereafter immune to smallpox.
Jenner presented Nelmes's hand to the public in the form of an elegant engraving (Fig. 1).(3) But his beautifully illustrated story of pastoral healing made little initial impression. The rural simplicity of the story of the dairymaid with a sore hand, like the rustic speech of that other volume of 1798, Lyrical Ballads, was too quiet, too bucolic, to find immediate understanding in a metropolis that was alarmed by the threat of invasion and revolution. After three months waiting in London to receive patients, Jenner retired to Gloucestershire. Not a single person had volunteered for vaccination. Jenner, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, needed to promote his work by explaining its innovatory significance--both to men of influence and to the reading public at large. The poets sent their volume to major politicians and added the polemical Preface; Jenner, likewise, launched a propaganda campaign designed to convince the socially powerful that Britain would benefit from the healing power of nature that he, a doctor who had "sought the lowly and sequestered paths of life,"(4) had harnessed. This essay tells the story of that campaign. It was a campaign that, from the start, presented science through the medium of poetry. Jenner attracted the services of romantic poets, who lent their verse to his efforts to create the taste by which his discovery might be enjoyed by the people. They helped him make his pastoral medicine seem socially and politically conservative as they sought public approval in a Britain dominated by war with revolutionary France.
[Figure 1 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Pastoralism and the Body
The taste for Jenner's medicine was affected by the fact that vaccination threatened to break some of the most powerful social and cultural taboos of its time. Jenner's discovery turned the pastoral ideal, long elaborated in polite poetry (including verse by Jenner himself)(5) into a strange reality. It made the life and lore of cowherds and dairymaids, typically portrayed as being of bucolic innocence and ignorance, into the saviors of the lives of their social superiors. Those who owned the land became dependent upon those Burke, in his attack on revolutionary politics, had called the "swinish multitude." Fellow doctors advised Jenner against publishing a theory that relied on "vulgar stories," since "the public opinion of his knowledge and discernment" would "materially suffer."(6) The Royal Society had already begun, in the words of a contemporary, "to suppress all Jacobin innovations" in science.(7) It refused to publish Jenner's theories "which appeared so much at variance with established knowledge, and withal so incredible."(8) 1798 was not a good year for a Briton to be challenging the established order.
The Inquiry did more than invert the social order: it made the bodies of pastoralists, and ultimately the bodies of cows, essential to the nation's health. Briton's bodies were to be invaded with cow pox matter scraped from the bodies of women such as Nelmes, and from the udders of cows. For vaccination differed from other medical advances: it penetrated the human body with matter derived from the bodies of beasts and, in so doing, it made people sick to make them well.
Jenner asked of people something much more profound than simply to accept that cowpox prevented smallpox. He asked them to accept that cattle and humans had similar constitutions at a time when medical men, philosophers, and politicians alike were drawing lines and creating categories not only between the human and the animal world, but within these worlds.(9) The Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae emerged from Jenner's training as a comparative anatomist. A pupil of the pioneering surgeon and naturalist, John Hunter, Jenner had long thought that examining the effects of disease on animals "casts a bright and steady light over some of the most obscure parts of human pathology" (quoted in Baron 1: 102). He argued that diseases were not just similar in animals and humans, but that they spread from one to the other: "Domestication of animals has certainly proved a prolific source of diseases among men" (quoted in Baron 1: 136). Cross-infection was rendered more likely when animals themselves had been cross-bred into hybrids (Jenner himself had conducted experiments to determine whether foxes and dogs would mate and breed). "The wolf, disarmed of ferocity," the Inquiry observed, had degenerated into the domesticated dog, often "pillowed in the lady's lap" (153).(10) Such unnatural intimacy between the human and the interbred animal made humans susceptible to a wide variety of diseases.
Animals mutated through crossbreeding to inferior versions of their former selves. Humans, likewise, became vulnerable to disease through degeneration. Through a sort of unnatural crossbreeding with industry and luxury, they were in a constant state of "deviation" from the state in which they were "originally placed by nature" (153). Sounding like Rousseau (regarded as one of the architects of the French Revolution), Jenner identified the causes of human degeneration, as "love of splendour," the "indulgences of luxury," and the association with "a great number of animals" (153). The upper class lady with her lapdog, living a life of ease and luxury, was already to radical writers, not least Coleridge and Wollstonecraft, a symbol of moral degeneracy.(11) She became, in Jenner's theory, a medical danger to the race. The Inquiry brought radical suspicion of aristocratic manners home to the body: luxury, Jenner's science suggested, tainted the blood. Pastoral simplicity, on the other hand, protected the body from corruption--and Jenner, as the engraving of Nelmes showed, had the hand to prove it.
Jenner's literalization of the pastoral ideal played to contemporary fears that the ruling classes had become corrupted by the wealth which stemmed from Britain's commercial success. But his pastoralized body bred as many fears as it answered. Fear of English men and women degenerating to cattle became the cornerstone of opposition to Jenner. In 1802 James Gillray published a cartoon imagining the "wonderful effects of the new inoculation" (Fig. 2): Gillray depicts vaccination as a wild orgy of transformation where a side-glancing doctor vaccinates subjects who then sprout cows from their limbs, buttocks, mouths, and ears. One poor vaccination victim simply grows a giant cowpox pustule from the right side of her face. Satanic horns erupt through the skull of another. The cartoon finds a graphic language to articulate widely-shared anxieties about the power of new science in the hands of an increasingly assertive medical profession. The development of comparative anatomy, like the advances in galvanism and electro-chemistry, threatened to invade and transform the human. Dr. Jenner, like the slightly later Dr. Frankenstein, has the power to metamorphose men into grotesque miscreations who are both man and beast.(12)
[Figure 2 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
This vaccination anxiety reached its pinnacle with Dr. Benjamin Moseley, a surgeon to Charles James Fox, who had spent many years treating smallpox in Jamaica. Moseley, like many in the medical profession, had a vested interest in the existing inoculation system, whereby doctors would take "infected matter" from one of the smallpox pustules of a diseased patient, preferably a patient who had a mild case of the disease. They scratched the infected matter into the arms of people who had never had smallpox in the hope it would make them immune. In many cases it did. But the inoculation was risky. The patient could die of smallpox or, more commonly, spread the disease to others and thus amplify the epidemic.(13) Inoculation did not, however, demand the infection of humans from the pustules of animals as did vaccination. Moseley imagined Jenner's patients degenerating into...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
