Vaccination, Poetry, and an Early-Nineteenth-Century Physiology of the Self

Edward Jenner’s 1798 publication, An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, transformed the British public’s relationship to smallpox, one of the period’s most dreaded diseases. For decades, an older procedure known as inoculation or variolation, which involved the introduction of fluid or matter from another human smallpox victim into the patient’s arm, had been used as a preventive measure against the disease in England. But as Jenner and others observed, inoculation, if performed imperfectly, could cause a healthy patient to develop the symptoms of smallpox or even the full-blown disease itself. Jenner’s innovation was to propose that cowpox, rather than smallpox, be the source of material for future inoculations. A safer and more effective alternative (whose name combined the more familiar “inoculation” with the Latin “vacca,” for cow), vaccination had its foundation in his observation that dairy workers who had been exposed to the relatively benign cowpox seemed to be insusceptible to the deadly smallpox;¹ in 1796, Jenner tested this hypothesized correlation by first presenting cowpox matter into the arm of a young boy, who remained unharmed and unaffected when later exposed to smallpox matter. The publication of these and subsequent observations was enough to convince many medical professionals and lay readers of vaccination’s value, and by 1810, Parliament had granted the Royal Jennerian Society tens of thousands of pounds to help promote the procedure widely.

Jenner’s discovery and publication have often been read by historians of medicine, such as George Rosen and Roy Porter, as a triumph of Enlightenment science, indeed, as one of the foundational episodes in the history of modern medicine.² And from our own twenty-first-century position as beneficiaries of Jenner’s research, most of us would agree that his work managed to transcend its moment in history. Yet, this perspective tends to overlook the cultural contexts of Jenner’s work and to emphasize its prescience rather than to read it as part of the late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century culture from which it emerged. Tim Fulford and Debbie Lee have taken an important step in the latter direction. They investigate the political contexts of vaccination’s discovery and, specifically, the implications of locating a cure in the bodies of agricultural laborers at a time of high anxiety about a working population in revolt in France, as well as Jenner’s corresponding efforts to frame his findings as consistent with a conservative British nationalism.³ Building on this foundation, their more recent Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era, co-authored with Peter Kitson, considers imperialism’s effects on British scientific research and demonstrates that the period’s pressing discussions about nation and race shaped the arguments of both vaccination’s supporters and opponents.⁴ Jenner’s science, in these accounts, enabled the period’s scientists and laypersons alike to employ the language of vaccination in representing perceived national and racial differences and in reinforcing national ideals. These works, along with David Shuttleton’s comprehensive Smallpox and the Literary Imagination, 1660–1820, have illuminated the ways in which vaccination was used to promote a British national and military agenda.⁵

In a similar spirit, my essay turns to vaccination’s cultural contexts, but focuses attention on its other, less explicitly political meanings. Specifically, where Fulford, Lee, and Kitson have read the period’s responses to vaccination as defining the self in terms of a national and racial character that could be opposed to a foreign other, my analysis asks how those responses framed the self, physiologically and philosophically. That is, how did writings about vaccination shape both medical and popular understandings of the relationship between the body’s physiological elements and personal identity? How did they articulate a conception of selfhood, not only in a national and racial sense, but also in a philosophical sense? I suggest that both medical and literary writers recognized questions of fundamental interest to the period’s major poets and philosophers—concerning the relationship between innocence and corruption and between identity and environment—at the center...