Inoculators, the Indigenous Obstacle to Vaccination in Colonial Burma

Colonial records on smallpox vaccination point to inoculations and inoculators as among the most serious obstacles to the progress of vaccination. However, despite their apparent importance, those identified as inoculators by the colonial medical officers remained an unclear, evasive and almost phantom-like group. This article examines how British colonial medical men wrote about a group who probably never existed in Burma outside of the colonial imagination. By locating the vaccinator’s enemy in a social practice and not in a particular group of practitioners, I seek to uncover the secret of inoculation’s resilience in the face of decades of aggressive vaccination campaigns. The inoculator was the bogeyman of colonial vaccination reports, requiring the historian to ask a different set of questions about indigenous resistance to colonial medicine and to look at the colonial records in a different way.