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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.
List of contents
1. Introduction: To Vaccinate, or Not to Vaccinate.- I. Diseases, Death, and Disability.- 2. Living on the Edge.- 3. Bad Odors, Nasty Dust, and Dangerous Bugs.- 4. Not My Child!.- II. Friendly Persuasion.- 5. Invisible Bugs Are Bad for You.- 6. Schoolhouse Medicine.- 7. Capstone Events.- III. Ethical Authority?.- 8. Mistake and Misdeeds.- 9. Blood.- 10. A Moral Compass?.- 11. A Problematic Process.- 12. School Days.- IV. Line Up and Roll Up Your Sleeves.- 13. Operation Needle.- 14. The Complexities of Mass Immunization Culture.- V. Intellectual Authority?.- 15. A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing.- 16. What Is Science?
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.
Summary
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.
Additional text
“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)
Report
"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)
