Jenner's famed papers detailing his discovery of the small pox vaccination, which has led to the eradication of the disease from the planet.

The story of the rise and fall of smallpox, one of the most savage killers in the history of mankind, and the only disease ever to be successfully exterminated (30 years ago next year) by a public health campaign.

Benjamin Moseley (1742-1819) was an English doctor who left England and spent eighteen years working in Kingston, Jamaica. His time there coincided with the massive expansion of sugar production on the island. Drawing on his own experience as well as an extensive range of classical and contemporary published sources, Moseley presents a lively history of the cultivation and use of sugar cane. The work, first published in 1799 and expanded in this second edition in 1800, discusses the origins of the plant and its later cultivation and development in the Americas, as well as the popularity of refined sugar. Special attention is devoted to the plant's medicinal uses. Moseley also became known for his outspoken opposition to the growing practice of vaccination, and he uses a medical essay in the appendix of this book to launch an attack on the effectiveness of cowpox in inoculations.

A history of the global spread of vaccination during the Napoleonic Wars, when millions of children were saved from smallpox.

The once-dreaded scourge of smallpox has been eradicated through barrier immunization. The eminent scientist Edward Jenner (1749-1823) was a pioneer in demonstrating that vaccination was an effective means of preventing smallpox. In the three groundbreaking treatises contained in this volume, originally published between 1798 and 1800, Jenner summarizes his evidence in favor of vaccination and describes individual cases.

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.

"When smallpox inoculation entered western medical practice in 1721 it aroused considerable controversy. A broad-based cohort of enlightened Germans such as publishers, poets, pastors and elite women attempted to dispel the doubts and encourage the innovative procedure. Yet many parents remained fearful, and the contagiousness of inoculation also necessitated a new approach. National pride in the past defeat of bubonic plague aroused optimism that smallpox could be banished using a similar strategy. The arrival in 1800 of Jenner's vaccine ended the debates by offering yet another promising new approach. Battling Smallpox before Vaccination explores the social and medical impacts of inoculation. It offers belated recognition for the valiant attempts of the many protagonists battling against the so-called 'murdering angel' before Edward Jenner's discovery of vaccination. It provides a comprehensive description and penetrating analysis of the understanding and perception of smallpox, the propagation of pro-inoculation information, varied reactions to inoculation, and debates over the idealistic goal of eradicating smallpox"--