Immunisation

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the search for immunisation. In 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, wrote a letter to her friend describing how she had witnessed the practice of smallpox inoculation in Constantinople. This involved the transfer of material from a smallpox postule into multiple cuts made in a vein. Lady Montagu had lost her brother to smallpox and was amazed that the Middle Eastern practice of inoculation rendered the fatal disease harmless. In Britain, the practice was unknown. Inoculation was an early attempt at creating immunity to disease, but was later dismissed when Edward Jenner pioneered immunisation through vaccination in 1796. Vaccination was hailed a huge success. Napoleon described it as the greatest gift to mankind, but when the British government introduced the compulsory Vaccination Act in 1853, targeted at the poor and the working class, it sparked a mass opposition movement.How did a Gloucestershire country surgeon become known as the father of vaccination? Why did the British government introduce compulsory smallpox vaccination in 1853? What were the consequences of those who opposed it? And how was the disease finally eradicated? With Nadja Durbach, Associate Professor of History at the University of Utah, Chris Dye, Co-ordinator of the World Health Organisation’s work on tuberculosis epidemiology, Sanjoy Bhattacharya, Lecturer in the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Nadja Durbach No other episodes
  Associate Professor of History at the University of Utah
• Chris Dye 2 episodes
  Co-ordinator of the World Health Organisation's work on tuberculosis epidemiology
• Sanjoy Bhattacharya No other episodes
  Lecturer in the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL

Related episodes

• The Origins of Infectious Disease
  
  9 Jun, 2011 570 Biology
• Man and Disease
  
  12 Dec, 2002 610 Medicine and health
• Louis Pasteur
  
  18 May, 2017 610 Medicine and health
• Microbiology
  
  8 Mar, 2007 570 Biology
• Anaesthetics
  
  29 Mar, 2007 610 Medicine and health
• Penicillin
  
  9 Jun, 2016 610 Medicine and health
• Medical Ethics
  
  16 Dec, 1999 170 Ethics
• Sir Thomas Browne
  
  6 Jun, 2019 820 English and Old English literatures
• Bacteriophages
  
  7 Jul, 2024 570 Biology
• The Plague of Justinian
  
  21 Jan, 2021 940 History of Europe

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: p003c19q

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003c19q

Auto-category: 614.4 (Prevention and control of specific diseases)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello in 1717 Lady Mary Montagu, the wife of the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, wrote a letter to her friend describing how she'd witnessed the practice of smallpox inoculation in Constantinople.