Le vaccin et ses simulacres : instaurer un être pour gérer une population, 1800-1865

Abstract

The story of the smallpox vaccine is of particular interest for analysing the role of knowledge in the exercise of power after the Revolution. Rather than establishing compulsory vaccination, the French Government decided to intervene in the medical sphere so as to impose a particular definition of the new virus. Human experimentation, clinical observation, the graphic definition of the vaccine and the statistical reorganisation of medical information enabled the doctors to impose the somewhat improbable definition of a non-virulent and perfectly benign virus preserving from smallpox for ever. The instauration of a vaccine is exemplary of an indirect mode of government relying on the proper definition of things. This helps to understand why the problem of contamination by vaccine, which had been noticed right at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was taken into account by the medical authorities in the 1860s only.

Keywords

• cowpox vaccine
• smallpox
• contamination
• syphilis
• medical statistics