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oapen-20.500.12657-470252021-03-04T02:15:01Z Chapter 1 Cultures of Contagion and Containment? Davenport, Romola vaccination England bic Book Industry Communication::M Medicine::MB Medicine: general issues::MBN Public health & preventive medicine Societal responses to epidemics can vary very widely, from extreme flight flight to apparent indifference. indifference. indifference. indifference. indifference. These variations are often considered to reflect structural differences in the extent of disease exposure, or cultural differences in the tendency to fatalism. Smallpox presented a major health challenge to early modern Eurasian societies, and both types of explanation have been used to account for large-scale variations in responses to the disease in Britain, Japan and Sweden, before the widespread use of vaccination. This This chapter considers the English case. Smallpox was an endemic disease of childhood in northern England, and there is little evidence of communal efforts efforts to control it, before the rapid uptake of vaccination after 1800. In the south of England however various strategies of isolation and mass immunisation were used by parish officials to reduce transmission, and smallpox remained a relatively rare and epidemic disease there outside the major cities. There are no obvious economic or geographical factors that would explain this pattern, and therefore this chapter considers cultural explanations first, before turning to an analysis of the roles that welfare institutions and uncoordinated local responses played in generating large-scale mortality patterns. 2021-03-03T10:40:47Z 2021-03-03T10:40:47Z 2020 chapter https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/47025 eng application/pdf Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Bookshelf_NBK565432.pdf Oxford University Press The Anthropological Demography of Health b9501915-cdee-4f2a-8030-9c0b187854b2 7955901b-235e-48a7-9436-b8baec104b74 d859fbd3-d884-4090-a0ec-baf821c9abfd Wellcome 18 Wellcome Trust Wellcome open access
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Societal responses to epidemics can vary very widely, from extreme flight flight to apparent indifference. indifference. indifference. indifference. indifference. These variations are often considered to reflect structural differences in the extent of disease exposure, or cultural differences in the tendency to fatalism. Smallpox presented a major health challenge to early modern Eurasian societies, and both types of explanation have been used to account for large-scale variations in responses to the disease in Britain, Japan and Sweden, before the widespread use of vaccination. This This chapter considers the English case. Smallpox was an endemic disease of childhood in northern England, and there is little evidence of communal efforts efforts to control it, before the rapid uptake of vaccination after 1800. In the south of England however various strategies of isolation and mass immunisation were used by parish officials to reduce transmission, and smallpox remained a relatively rare and epidemic disease there outside the major cities. There are no obvious economic or geographical factors that would explain this pattern, and therefore this chapter considers cultural explanations first, before turning to an analysis of the roles that welfare institutions and uncoordinated local responses played in generating large-scale mortality patterns.
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