A History of Vaccination for Smallpox in Southeast Asia, 1804-1945 - Abstract:
The goal of this project is to produce a regional history of local responses to vaccination
for smallpox in Southeast Asia from its first introduction in 1804 to the initiation, in 1966,
of the World Health Organization's program to eradicate smallpox. Southeast Asia has
been a crossroads where peoples, and their microbes, from East Africa, Europe, the
Middle East, India, East Asia and Australasia have come into contact since pre-historic
times. This is true not only of ancient human scourges such as smallpox, cholera, and
malaria but also of more recent international public health problems such as SARS and
Zika virus. For at least a thousand years before the World Health Organization declared
smallpox eradicated, this dread disease adversely affected the physical health of
individuals and the economic health of entire communities worldwide. Thus, in each
place where vaccination to prevent smallpox was introduced it provoked interest.
However, it sometimes also produced controversy, and in each place the interest and
the controversy were shaped by local factors and local actors. Worldwide, when
political decisions were made to enforce vaccination, this produced resistance and in
colonial societies protests against vaccination and other health regulations were often
co-opted by anti-colonial movements. In a post-colonial globalized world, the history of
vaccination for smallpox offers a window on the social factors which molded, and still
mold, responses to international efforts to eradicate specific epidemic diseases. The
environmental, ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity of Southeast Asia ensures that a
monograph on the history of vaccination in the countries of Southeast Asia will offer
particularly interesting insights into this global story. Through careful analysis of the
records of colonial and indigenous governments, private papers from colonial and
indigenous physicians and nurses, and local newspapers and magazines, this study will
offer information pertinent to both historic and current controversies regarding
prophylactic treatments, such as vaccinations and inoculations, for epidemic diseases.
