Medicine - Dharampal’s comments on inoculation

Excerpts from Dharampalji's book Indian Science and Technology in the 18th Century (1971)

Till 1720, when the wife of the then British Ambassador in Turkey, having got her children successfully inoculated, began to advocate its introduction into Britain, the practice of inoculation was unknown to the British medical and scientific world. Proving relatively successful, though for a considerable period vehemently opposed by large sections of the medical profession and the theologians of Oxford etc., awareness grew about its value and the various medical men engaged themselves in enquiries concerning it in different lands.

Inoculation against the smallpox seems to have been universal, if not throughout, in large parts of Northern and Southern India, till it was banned in Calcutta and other places under the Bengal Presidency (and perhaps elsewhere) from around 1802-3. Its banning undoubtedly was done in the name of 'humanity', and justified by the Superintendent General of Vaccine Inoculation in his first report in March 1804. (A vaccine, from the Latin vacca, meaning cow, for use in the inoculating against small pox was manufactured by Dr. E. Jenner in 1798. From then on this vaccine replaced the previous 'variolous' matter, taken from human agents. Hence the method using the 'vaccine' came to be called 'Vaccine Inoculation'.)

After giving the details of the indigenous practice, Holwell stated "When the before recited treatment of the inoculated is strictly followed, it is next to a miracle to hear, that one in a million fails of receiving the infection, or of one that miscarried under it." It is possible that Holwell's information was not as accurate as of the newly appointed Superintendent General of Vaccine Inoculation in 1804. According to the latter fatalities amongst the inoculated were around one in two hundred amongst the Indian population and amongst the Europeans in Calcutta, etc. "one in sixty or seventy". The wider risk, however, seems to have been in the spreading of disease by contagion from the inoculated themselves to those who for one reason or another had not been inoculated.

So what, till the latter part of the eighteenth century, when practised universally in any tract, was a relatively successful method and involved no contagious effect, as all were then similarly inoculated, by 1800 had begun to seem a great hazard to the Europeans in Calcutta. But in spite of the banning, prohibitions, etc. resorted to in Calcutta and other cities and towns, the introduction of vaccine inoculation was very halting. Such halting development must have been caused by insufficient provisions of resources or by sheer indifference. Or as hinted by the officiating Superintendent General of Vaccination for
N.W.P. (the present U.P.) in 1870, it may also have been caused by the peoples' reluctance to get vaccinated as, according to this authority, this indigenous inoculation possessed more "protective power than is possessed by vaccination performed in a damp climate". Whatever the causes, the indigenous inoculation seems to have been still practised around 1870. For areas near Calcutta those who were not so inoculated are estimated at 10% of the population about 1870 and for the Benares area at 36%. The frequent smallpox epidemics which were rampant in various parts of India in the nineteenth and early
twentieth century may largely be traced back on the one hand to the state's backwardness and indifference in making the requisite arrangement for universal vaccination, and on the other hand to having difficult by not only withdrawing all support to it but also forcing it to be practised secretly and stealthily.

By K. Kesava Rao
Department of Chemical Engineering
Indian Institute of Science
Bengaluru 560012, India
kesava@iisc.ac.in

...To be continued ...

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