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(More customer reviews)Historian Ann Janetta has taken the stories of the conquest of smallpox, one of the worst plagues of humanity until Edward Jenner invented vaccination, and the story of a nation living in splendid isolation, and woven the two into a fascinating tale. I was totally unaware of the way in which efforts to introduce cowpox into Japan (a frustratingly slow process) helped prepare that nation to vault onto the world stage following the Meiji restoration. This volume is more than a wonderful exercise in historical scholarship, as it should serve as a goldmine for those interested in cultural evolution. It reflects on such key topics as the importance of individuals and networks in promoting that evolution, as well as the promoting and retarding functions of institutions. It clearly shows, in the spirit of Montesquieu and Jared Diamond, the way features of the natural world -- in this case a highly lethal virus, a related virus that was difficult to transport, and a nation occupying an isolated archipelago -- can influence human affairs as much as any king or president. Besides being a gold mine for those interested in Japanese history or in understanding cultural evolution, it's just plain engrossing. Janetta has done us all a great favor.
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Vaccinators: Smallpox, Medical Knowledge, and the 'Opening' of Japan
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 to this health crisis, 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, via various foreign and domestic networks, 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. With an interesting parallel to the recent SARS crisis, The Vaccinators details the appalling cost of Japan's almost three-hundred-year isolation and examines in depth a nation on the cusp of political and social upheaval.
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