Vaccinators

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.

"[A] concise and insightful medical history of late Tokugawa Japan, focusing on Japan's adoption of Jennerian vaccination against smallpox during the early 19th century . . . Jannetta's historical research provides a valuable avenue to understanding how contact with Western knowledge helped Japan break away from self-imposed isolation toward modernization.", "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 has done a wonderful job of presenting not only the medical and political but also the artistic, intellectual, religious, and social context of the introduction of Jennerian vaccination to Japan . . . The Vaccinators is a wonderful addition to the scholarly literature on the Dutch enclave in Japan, on nineteenth-century Japan, on the history of medicine in Japan, and on the history of the worldwide diffusion of vaccination.", "A fascinating look at Japanese culture and politics in the last century, and the attitudes of those outside who wanted to at least see in.", "Jannetta has accomplished an admirable task in tracing the technology transfer, which encompasses Europe, the Americas, and Asia, utilizing extensive sources written in multiple (some classical) languages. The book is useful for students and teachers in world history, medical history, environmental history, and Japanese history, society, and politics. For scholars interested in the changing relationships between people and microbes, and the dynamics of the nineteenth-century global commercial/intellectual networks and the Tokugawa seclusion policy, Jannetta's study will provide a wealth of insights."

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?