eBook

The Smallpox Report

Wang, Fuson

2023

Overview

After the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccination has become synonymous with an opaque biopower that legislates compulsory immunization at a distance. Contemporary illness narratives have become outlets for distrust, misinformation, reckless denialism, and selfish noncompliance. In The Smallpox Report , Fuson Wang rewinds this contemporary impasse between physician and patient back to the Romantic-era origins of vaccination. The book offers a literary-historical account of smallpox vaccination, contending that the disease’s eventual eradication in 1980 was as much a triumph of the literary imagination as it was an achievement of medical Enlightenment science. Wang traces our modern pandemic-era crisis of vaccine hesitancy back to Edward Jenner’s publication of his treatise on vaccination in 1798, the first rumblings of an anti-vaccination movement, and vaccination’s formative literary history that included authors such as William Wordsworth, William Blake, John Keats, Mary Shelley, and Arthur Conan Doyle. The book concludes with a re-examination of the current deeply contentious public discourse about vaccines that has arisen in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. By recovering the surprisingly literary genres of Romantic-era medical writing, The Smallpox Report models a new literary historical perspective on our own crises of vaccine refusal.

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Subject: 18th century / anti-vaccination / Arthur Conan Doyle / COVID / Darwin / Diseases in literature / Edward Jenner / England / English literature / epidemics / Gothic & Romance / History / History and criticism / History of Science & Technology / illness narrative / John Keats / Language & Literature / LITERARY CRITICISM / LITERARY CRITICISM / Gothic & Romance / LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 18th Century / LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century / Literature and medicine / Mary Shelley / MEDICAL / MEDICAL / History / Medicine in literature / pandemic / Romantic literature / Romanticism / smallpox / Smallpox in literature / Smallpox vaccine / Vaccination / Vaccination in literature / Vaccine hesitancy / William Blake / William Wordsworth
• ISBN: 9781487546595, 1487546599, 9781487546625, 1487546629, 9781487546601, 1487546602