韩国裸舞

Inoculation in Early Modern India: Evidence from the East India Company Archive

Dr. Anna Winterbottom
韩国裸舞

While the origins of vaccination have been widely studied, inoculation, on which vaccination is based, is less well known. Inoculation involved deliberately infecting a patient with a mild version of smallpox, conferring future protection against the disease. Inoculation was described in Chinese texts from the sixteenth century onwards. By the eighteenth century, it was practiced elsewhere in East Asia, and in parts of South Asia, and the Ottoman Empire, from where it was introduced to Europe. Inoculation was also known in some areas of West Africa, from where enslaved people introduced it to parts of the Americas. In this paper, I examine how the technique of inoculation was transmitted across different medical cultures and between different religious and linguistic communities. I use a case study of a letter written in 1801 and preserved in the East India Company archive. This letter, which is translated from Telugu into English, describes how inoculation was transmitted southwards from Bengal to Andhra Pradesh. The movement of the practice involved several forms of translation: linguistic, religious, and bodily. The East India Company archive also reveals that both the Company and Indian rulers provided patronage for inoculation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, using the technique as a public demonstration of power and benevolence.