Overview
- Offers an engaging study of the Salk polio vaccine trials, the largest in history, placing them in the context of earlier vaccine trials in the first half of the twentieth century
- Foregrounds the understudied role of the public education system in the history of vaccination
- Examines the contemporary antivaccination movement in the United States and its roots, tracing the development of parents’ perceptions about the risks that vaccinations posed for their children
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology (PSHST)
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About this book
The success of the polio vaccine was a remarkable breakthrough for medical science, effectively eradicating a dreaded childhood disease. It was also the largest medical experiment to use American schoolchildren. Richard J. Altenbaugh examines an uneasy conundrum in the history of vaccination: even as vaccines greatly mitigate the harm that infectious disease causes children, the process of developing these vaccines put children at great risk as research subjects. In the first half of the twentieth century, in the face of widespread resistance to vaccines, public health officials gradually medicalized American culture through mass media, public health campaigns, and the public education system. Schools supplied tens of thousands of young human subjects to researchers, school buildings became the main dispensaries of the polio antigen, and the mass immunization campaign that followed changed American public health policy in profound ways. Tapping links between bioethics, education, public health, and medical research, this book raises fundamental questions about child welfare and the tension between private and public responsibility that still fuel anxieties around vaccination today.
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Table of contents (16 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Diseases, Death, and Disability
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Front Matter
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Friendly Persuasion
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Front Matter
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Ethical Authority?
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Front Matter
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Line Up and Roll Up Your Sleeves
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Front Matter
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Intellectual Authority?
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Front Matter
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Reviews
“This could be a book for parents whose children would be vaccinated. … More widely, it is a book for practitioners who have to cope with parental refusal of vaccination, historians of social medicine and, possibly, students of the history of medicine thanks to its interdisciplinary approach combining bioethics, education, research, and public health policies.” (Alain Touwaide, Doody's Book Reviews, May 31, 2019)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Richard J. Altenbaugh is Adjunct Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, USA, and former Visiting Fellow at St. Edmund's College, University of Cambridge, UK. His most recent book is The Last Children’s Plague: Poliomyelitis, Disability, and Twentieth-Century American Culture.
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Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Vaccination in America
Book Subtitle: Medical Science and Children’s Welfare
Authors: Richard J. Altenbaugh
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96349-5
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-96348-8Published: 16 August 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-07179-0Published: 25 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-96349-5Published: 02 August 2018
Series ISSN: 2730-972X
Series E-ISSN: 2730-9738
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VIII, 355
Topics: US History, History of Medicine, Social History, Children, Youth and Family Policy, US Politics, History of Science
Keywords
- history of vaccine policy
- public suspicion toward governmental vaccination policy
- history of the polio vaccine
- MMR vaccine policy in America
- Salk vaccine trials
- poliomyelitis
- history of public education
- infantile paralysis
- cowpox vaccine
- antivaccination movement
- Progressive Era public health
- smallpox inoculation
- children in medical research studies
- Nuremberg Code
- mass immunization
- federal policy childhood vaccination
- MMR and autism
- child welfare medical research
- us politics