[In the following essay, Fulford and Lee focus on how the vaccination debate prompted by the small pox research of Edward Jenner resonated with the concerns of Romantic pastoral poetry and, in turn, the class divisions of early nineteenth-century society. In particular, the authors emphasize Jenner's relationship with the rural poet Robert Bloomfield.]

In 1798, Britain was preparing for invasion by French revolutionary armies. To the government and the press it seemed ill-prepared to defend itself. The navy had recently mutinied at Spithead and the Nore, and pro-French radicals were fomenting discontent amongst the laboring classes. Worse still, France was threatening Britain's colonies in the East and West Indies. Faced with the exigencies of national politics and imperial war, the established powers in London found little opportunity to pay attention to what turned out to be the most significant event of that year—the quiet appearance in print of a medical treatise entitled An Inquiry into The Causes and Effects of The Variolae Vaccinae, A Disease Discovered in Some of the Western Counties of England … and known by the name of The Cow Pox.¹ This revolutionary work by Edward Jenner, a little-known provincial doctor, outlined the first ever theory of vaccination, making the eventual global eradication of smallpox possible.²

Jenner's Inquiry was beautiful in its simplicity. It was not rooted in visions of national and international conquest of disease, but in the bodies of those who worked in the English countryside. It was not about global politics but about rural health. It was not derived from scientific authorities but from the oral tradition of Gloucestershire villagers. Just over seventy pages in length, it presented a series of stories about dairy maids, farm hands, paupers, and man servants whose daily, pastoral, activities brought them in touch with cows and cowpox, and thus made them immune to smallpox. The most important case was that of dairymaid Sarah Nelmes. “Infected with the cow-pox from her master's cows,” Nelmes's pustulised hand provided the infected matter for Jenner's most crucial experiment. He inserted Nelmes's cowpox into the arm of a “healthy boy, about eight years old” (An Inquiry 153). The boy, he discovered, barely took sick and was thereafter immune to smallpox.

Jenner presented Nelmes's hand to the public in the form of an elegant engraving.³ But his beautifully illustrated story of pastoral healing made little initial impression. The rural simplicity of the story of the dairymaid with a sore hand, like the rustic speech of that other volume of 1798, Lyrical Ballads, was too quiet, too bucolic, to find immediate understanding in a metropolis that was alarmed by the threat of invasion and revolution. After three months waiting in London to receive patients, Jenner retired to Gloucestershire. Not a single person had volunteered for vaccination. Jenner, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, needed to promote his work by explaining its innovatory significance—both to men of influence and to the reading public at large. The poets sent their volume to major politicians and added the polemical Preface; Jenner, likewise, launched a propaganda campaign designed to convince the socially powerful that Britain would benefit from the healing power of nature that he, a doctor who had “sought the lowly and sequestered paths of life,”⁴ had harnessed. This essay tells the story of that campaign. It was a campaign that, from the start, presented science through the medium of poetry. Jenner attracted the services of romantic poets, who lent their verse to his efforts to create the taste by which his discovery might be enjoyed by the people. They helped him make his pastoral medicine seem socially and politically conservative as they sought public approval in a Britain dominated by war with revolutionary France.

PASTORALISM AND THE BODY

The taste for Jenner's medicine was affected by the fact that vaccination threatened to break some of the most powerful social and cultural taboos of its time. Jenner's discovery turned the pastoral ideal, long elaborated in polite poetry (including verse by Jenner himself)⁵ into a strange reality. It made the life and lore of cowherds and dairymaids, typically portrayed as being of bucolic innocence and ignorance, into the saviors of the lives of their social superiors. Those who owned the land became dependent upon those Burke, in his attack on revolutionary politics, had called the “swinish multitude.” Fellow doctors advised Jenner against publishing a theory that relied on “vulgar stories,” since “the public opinion of his knowledge and discernment” would “materially suffer.”⁶ The Royal Society had already begun, in the words of a contemporary, “to suppress all Jacobin innovations” in science.⁷ It refused to publish Jenner's theories “which appeared so much at variance with established knowledge, and withal so incredible.”⁸ 1798 was not a good year for a Briton to be challenging the established order.

The Inquiry did more than invert the social order: it made the bodies of pastoralists, and ultimately the bodies of cows, essential to the nation's health. Briton's bodies were to be invaded with cow pox matter scraped from the bodies of women such as Nelmes, and from the udders of cows. For vaccination differed from other medical advances: it penetrated the human body with matter derived from the bodies of beasts and, in so doing, it made people sick to make them well.

Jenner asked of people something much more profound than simply to accept that cowpox prevented smallpox. He asked them to accept that cattle and humans had similar constitutions at a time when medical men, philosophers, and politicians alike were drawing lines and creating categories not only between the human and the animal world, but within these worlds.⁹ The Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae emerged from Jenner's training as a comparative anatomist. A pupil of the pioneering surgeon and naturalist, John Hunter, Jenner had long thought that examining the effects of disease on animals “casts a bright and steady light over some of the most obscure parts of human pathology” (quoted in Baron 1: 102). He argued that diseases were not just similar in animals and humans, but that they spread from one to the other: “Domestication of animals has certainly proved a prolific source of diseases among men” (quoted in Baron 1: 136). Cross-infection was rendered more likely when animals themselves had been cross-bred into hybrids (Jenner himself had conducted experiments to determine whether foxes and dogs would mate and breed). “The wolf, disarmed of ferocity,” the Inquiry observed, had degenerated into the domesticated dog, often “pillowed in the lady's lap” (153).¹⁰ Such unnatural intimacy between the human and the interbred animal made humans susceptible to a wide variety of diseases.

Animals mutated through crossbreeding to inferior versions of their former selves. Humans, likewise, became vulnerable to disease through degeneration. Through a sort of unnatural crossbreeding with industry and luxury, they were in a constant state of “deviation” from the state in which they were “originally placed by nature” (153). Sounding like Rousseau (regarded as one of the architects of the French Revolution), Jenner identified the causes of human degeneration, as “love of splendour,” the “indulgences of luxury,” and the association with “a great number of animals” (153). The upper class lady with her lapdog, living a life of ease and luxury, was already to radical writers, not least Coleridge and Wollstonecraft, a symbol of moral degeneracy.¹¹ She became, in Jenner's theory, a medical danger to the race. The Inquiry brought radical suspicion of aristocratic manners home to the body: luxury, Jenner's science suggested, tainted the blood. Pastoral simplicity, on the other hand, protected the body from corruption—and Jenner, as the engraving of Nelmes showed, had the hand to prove it.

Jenner's literalization of the pastoral ideal played to contemporary fears that the ruling classes had become corrupted by the wealth which stemmed from Britain's commercial success. But his pastoralized body bred as many fears as it answered. Fear of English men and women degenerating to cattle became the cornerstone of opposition to Jenner. In 1802 James Gillray published a cartoon imagining the “wonderful effects of the new inoculation”: Gillray depicts vaccination as a wild orgy of transformation where a side-glancing doctor vaccinates subjects who then sprout cows from their limbs, buttocks, mouths, and ears. One poor vaccination victim simply grows a giant cowpox pustule from the right side of her face. Satanic horns erupt through the skull of another. The cartoon finds a graphic language to articulate widely-shared anxieties about the power of new science in the hands of an increasingly assertive medical profession. The development of comparative anatomy, like the advances in galvanism and electro-chemistry, threatened to invade and transform the human. Dr. Jenner, like the slightly later Dr. Frankenstein, has the power to metamorphose men into grotesque miscreations who are both man and beast.¹²

This vaccination anxiety reached its pinnacle with Dr. Benjamin Moseley, a surgeon to Charles James Fox, who had spent many years treating smallpox in Jamaica. Moseley, like many in the medical profession, had a vested interest in the existing inoculation system, whereby doctors would take “infected matter” from one of the smallpox pustules of a diseased patient, preferably a patient who had a mild case of the disease. They scratched the infected matter into the arms of people who had never had smallpox in the hope it would make them immune. In many cases it did. But the inoculation was risky. The patient could die of smallpox or, more commonly, spread the disease to others and thus amplify the epidemic.¹³ Inoculation did not, however, demand the infection of humans from the pustules of animals as did vaccination. Moseley imagined Jenner's patients degenerating into beasts:

Can any person say what may be the consequences of introducing a bestial humour into the human frame, after a long lapse of years? Who knows, besides, what ideas may rise, in the course of time, from a brutal fever having excited its incongruous impression on the brain? Who knows, also, that the human character may undergo strange mutations from quadruped sympathy; and that some modern Pasiphae may rival the fables of old?¹⁴

Moseley parodied Jenner's pastoral language and his theory that disease cross-bred from animal into human form. He speculated “that owing to vaccination the british ladies might wander in the fields to receive the embraces of the bull.”¹⁵ Vaccination had become sexual bestiality, infection a form of impregnation. Pasiphae gave birth to the minotaur: vaccination, in Moseley's allegory, produced monsters, having corrupted the moral character of British gentlewomen from the inside out.¹⁶

Moseley found allies amongst other doctors who were unconvinced of vaccination's safety and reluctant to lose the income stemming from their professional success as inoculators. Together they launched a noisy pamphlet campaign against Jenner's new science.¹⁷ They attacked him by associating his innovatory science with revolutionary France: “are we to worship—to applaud—or even to submit to Evil,—to Buonaparte—or to Vaccination …—No!—Never let us degrade our honour—our virtue—or our consciences—by such servility:—let us contend against them, with all our exertions and might;—not doubting but we shall ultimately triumph, in a cause supported by truth, humanity, and virtue, and which therefore we well know Heaven itself must approve.”¹⁸ Resisting Jenner was like resisting Napoleon, a divinely sanctioned mission against threats to the established order in Britain.

Jenner's opponents struck at the heart of his discovery. They cast doubt on vaccination's safety. “The Holles Street Case” was Moseley's most startling commentary on the subject. In this case, a nine month old boy who was vaccinated began to grow “on his back and loins patches of hair, not resembling his own hair, for that was of a light colour, but brown, and of the same length and quality as that of a cow” (Thornton 385). Moseley's hysteric account, like Gillray's cartoon, imagines a cow erupting from the boy's skin in a way even more horrifying than the way smallpox pustules erupted. If this were not enough, Moseley warned against a cowpox conspiracy. “The Cow Pox medical men,” he claimed, “were numerous and powerful … they had their eye on every person who made observations against the Cow Pox … they determined to do all the injury they could to any men, who should make known any cases of mischief, or failure” (Moseley 64). Moseley also suggested that vaccination could cause “Cow Mania,” affecting the brain, and in this sense he prefigures the present-day British fear of B.S.E./mad-cow disease:

Though I am ready to admit that the Cow-pox is not contagious,—yet I know the Cow Mania is; and that the malady, whether arising from empty ventricles of the brain, or from excessive thickness of the os frontis, makes the distempered, to men not steeled against the infirmities of his fellow creatures, more objects of pity than of resentment;—more proper—than any infected from the Levant,—to perform solitary quarantine on beds of straw.

(Moseley, quoted in Thornton 231)

Moseley's remark about the Levant plays on racial fears. It implies that vaccinators leave their subjects like those with diseases caught from Orientals; they infect rather than protect. They degrade the blood just as sexual contact with “beast-like” West Indian slaves did.¹⁹ Yet Moseley's racist reaction to vaccination may have helped Jenner win public acceptance. Because Moseley articulated the fear of humans turning into cattle in such an extreme way, the medical profession came, after considerable initial doubt about vaccination, to reject opposition to it as irrational prejudice.²⁰

PATRONS

If the profession and the public came gradually to accept vaccination, it was not by accident. Faced with Moseley's virulent parody of the pastoralism of the Inquiry, Jenner had soon realized that he needed powerful supporters. Any radical implications to his theories about luxury were left behind as Jenner set out to cultivate the patronage of royalty and aristocracy. Jenner's neighbor, the Earl of Berkeley, used his influence at Court to gain an audience for the doctor. On 7 March 1800 Jenner was presented to the King, who gave permission for the second edition of the Inquiry to be dedicated to him. That same month, he was also received by the Prince of Wales, thus ensuring that vaccination had the public approbation of the man who would succeed as Regent when his father again went mad. The Prince of Wales moved in a younger, more fashionable circle than George iii. He also patronized the Whig opposition. By meeting both King and Prince, Jenner had received an injection of patronage that ensured vaccination would spread to all corners of the aristocratic and political elite.

It was through the characteristically eighteenth-century mechanism of patronage that vaccination first took hold in Britain. Jenner was careful to ensure that he cultivated the most influential people—by the end of March 1800 he had also been presented to the Queen, whose eighth son had died of smallpox almost seventeen years earlier. Later he vaccinated the adopted boy of Princess Caroline: approval by the royal mothers was a powerful sanction for the ladies of the aristocracy, who rapidly moved to have their own children vaccinated.

If the ladies of the aristocracy spread vaccination by example, their husbands had more direct power. The Earl of Lonsdale was a Tory magnate with some of the most extensive landholdings in the country. In October 1800 he had Dr. Robert Thornton vaccinate all four hundred inhabitants of the estate-village of Lowther. In the following weeks Thornton vaccinated about one thousand more locals who rented their homes and lands from the Earl. Vaccination was spread from the top down, not by government-organized campaigns but from royalty to aristocracy, and from aristocracy to their tenants. It was disseminated, that is to say, through the existing power-structure of Britain, which depended upon the manipulation of patronage, interest and obligation, on an informal basis, by the landowning elite. Jenner made himself an establishment man, astute enough to secure patronage. Suspicious of radicals such as Tom Paine and William Cobbett,²¹ he kept his oppositional politics private²² and allied his science with high society—in conscious difference from radical scientists such as Erasmus Darwin and Joseph Priestley.²³ Wordsworth, of course, was to take the same route, accepting the patronage of the Lonsdale family who had pioneered vaccination in Lowther. Both doctor and poet overcame indifference to their versions of pastoral by making alliances with the aristocratic class of which they had first been implicitly critical.

PATRONIZING A POET: JENNER AND ROBERT BLOOMFIELD

If Jenner sought patrons, he also acted as one. He encouraged a far more popular rural poet than Wordsworth to write verse praising vaccination. Robert Bloomfield, who termed himself a “writer of Pastoral poetry, and literally a Cow-boy,”²⁴ was a former farm laborer and shoemaker who had taught himself verse-making after reading Thomson's The Seasons. Patronized by Capel Lofft and the Duke of Grafton, Bloomfield had published The Farmer's Boy in 1800. It had achieved immediate popular success on a scale made possible by the rapidly expanding book market. Twenty-six thousand copies were sold in fewer than three years, and translations appeared in French, Italian and Latin. To the poetry-reading public, Bloomfield was marketed as an authentic rustic voice, a peasant turned poet, whose pastorals were rooted in his childhood experience of sheep and cowherding. Bloomfield seemed to accept this version of himself, albeit with anxiety, writing that being allowed to remain silent in fashionable company “is no small privilege to a man swung at arm's length into publicity with all his mechanical habits and embarrassments about him. How far such habits are, or ought to be, overcome, is a question upon which I have not decided” (Poems of Bloomfield 1: ii).

Jenner, himself a poet, showed an astute understanding of the possibilities presented by Bloomfield's success in the burgeoning public sphere addressed by poetry. He encouraged Bloomfield to write on vaccination. After all, Bloomfield was not only the poet in vogue, and not only a former cow-herd, but a rustic who had suffered the effects of smallpox. His father had died of the disease when he was a year old. By July 1802 the gentleman-doctor, accustomed to writing pastoral verse himself, was inviting the laborer-poet to tea, with the intention of directing and correcting his vaccination poem. Bloomfield accepted the hospitality, but worried that Jenner was too pressing a patron:

This moment a letter from Dr. Jenner invites me to tea this evening. What shall I do—leave 150 lines of an unfinished subject in his hands? I am bound to consult Mr. Lofft and the Duke, and to submit pieces to their judgment, and never will do otherwise; and yet it is hard to say no in such cases as this. I wish he would suspend his curiosity six months, and I would take my chance. He is a very amiable man, and perhaps rates my abilities too high. He is an enthusiast, in his pursuit.²⁵

Jenner was not a man to let the chance for favorable publicity from a fashionable writer go begging. He pursued Bloomfield until his vaccination poem was published. In 1803 he was writing to Bloomfield “enquiring my determination as to the poem ‘On Vaccination,’ and expressing great interest in my welfare” (Correspondence of Bloomfield, 29 Feb. 1803: 31).

Bloomfield's poem, Good Tidings; Or, News From the Farm appeared in 1804, with a dedication to Jenner. True to Bloomfield's public image as “the farmer's boy,” the poem spread the gospel of vaccination from the country to the town-based public. The poem begins with a pastoral scene of a kind familiar to today's readers of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake. It focuses on a simple, innocent child of nature at play.

                    … so admirably fair,
With guileless dimples, and with flaxen hair
That waves in ev'ry breeze … he's often seen
Beside yon cottage wall, or on the green,
With others match'd in spirit and in size,
Health on their cheeks, and rapture in their eyes;
That full expanse of voice, to childhood dear,
Soul of their sports, is duly cherish'd here;
And hark! that laugh is his, that jovial cry;
He hears the ball and trundling hoop brush by

(lines 1-10, Poems of Bloomfield 1: 100-125)

But this child is blighted by smallpox: “the boy is blind” (22). He is a pathetic figure, an embodiment of rural innocence and natural growth that is tainted by a disease spread from city to country: “When last year's corn was green upon the ground: / From yonder town infection found its way” (48-49).

Bloomfield's poem is a powerful one because it is driven by his rhetorical efforts to resolve a tension which went to the very heart of his poetic authority as a “writer of Pastoral poetry and literally a Cow-boy.” It was a tension that affected Wordsworth and John Clare too, for it arose from the attempt to claim that the idealizations inherent in the genre of pastoral poetry were observable in the lives of contemporary rural laborers. When, as was the case for Bloomfield and Clare, the poet's own position as a former laborer was one of the reasons for his fashionable success, the tension became threatening to his commercial prospects and to his sense of identity. Both Bloomfield and Clare suffered declining sales and increasing personal crises.

What is at stake in Good Tidings is the very continuance of a rural way of life upon which Bloomfield's poetic authority depends. He had made his reputation as a poet who, by virtue of his peasant upbringing (normally an insuperable disadvantage for a would-be poet), could uniquely root the pastoral ideal in the real. But smallpox threatened to uproot the ideal from the experienced world—to destroy innocence and peace as it wiped out whole families and blasted entire communities. Smallpox threatened Bloomfield's precarious poetic career because it exposed a fatal gap between the real world of farm laborers of which he had personal experience, and the idealized version of it to which his publication as a “pastoral” poet committed him.

Bloomfield's sense of the danger his muse was in is evident in the dedication, which pleads that “the egotism, so conspicuous in the poem … ought to be forgiven” (1: 100). In the poem itself, he again apologized for including grim details drawn from his real personal history, for these details undermined the pastoral poetic models to which he (and his readers) wanted to conform. Yet these details constitute the most powerful passage in the poem as smallpox menaces the Bloomfield family's domestic bliss:

Home, where six children, yielding to its pow'r,
Gave hope and patience a most trying hour;
One at her breast still drew the living stream,
And sense of danger never marr'd his dream;
Yet all exclaim'd, and with a pitying eye
“Whoe'er survives the shock, that child will die!”
But vain the fiat,—Heav'n restor'd them all,
And destin'd one of riper years to fall.
Midnight beheld the close of all his pain,
His grave was clos'd when midnight came again;
No bell was heard to toll, no funeral pray'r,
No kindred bow'd, no wife, no children there;
Its horrid nature could inspire a dread
That cut the bonds of custom like a thread.

(179-92)

As if anticipating Jeffrey's attacks on the dismal egotism of Wordsworth's rural verse, Bloomfield has his imaginary readers criticize him: “‘Why tell us tales of woe, thou who didst give / Thy soul to rural themes, and bade them live? / What means this zeal of thine, this kindling fire? / The rescu'd infant and the dying sire?’” (201-4). To this the poet replies by trading on the affection readers feel for him as author of The Farmer's Boy. He calls the reader a “Kind heart,” he terms himself “the lowly minstrel dear to thee” (205, 207). He asks for pity on the basis that his humble origins exposed him to the disease which makes visions of rural peace hard to sustain. If he sinks below the pastoral into “tales of woe” it is because he was the child whose father died: “Though love enjoin'd not infant eyes to weep, / In manhood's zenith shall his feelings sleep?” (211-12). Pathos, it seems, is the device by which Bloomfield will overcome the division between his own experience of rural life and the pastoral terms into which he is expected to translate it.

Pathos is not the poem's final solution to the tensions in Bloomfield's position: Edward Jenner is. Vaccination saved Bloomfield's muse because it made the pastoral ideal seem liveable—at least in one poem. It allowed it again to appear rooted in actual rural life. He said as much explicitly:

Sweet beam'd the star of peace upon those days
When Virtue watch'd my childhood's quiet ways,
Whence a warm spark of Nature's holy flame
Gave the farm-yard an honourable name,
But left one theme unsung: then, who had seen
In herds that feast upon the vernal green,
Or dreamt that in the blood of kine there ran
Blessings beyond the sustenance of man?
We tread the meadow, and we scent the thorn,
We hail the day-spring of a summer's morn;
Nor mead at dawning day, nor thymy heath,
Transcends the fragrance of the heifer's breath:
May that dear fragrance, as it floats along
O'er ev'ry flow'r that lives in rustic song;
May all the sweets of meadows and of kine
Embalm, O Health! this offering at thy shrine.

(81-94)

The sweet smell of success was the “dear fragrance” of a cow's breath, now revealed not just as a feature of rustic song, but as nature's remedy for diseases bred in towns.

Briefly, Bloomfield's pastoralism offers to become socially radical. Not only is rural life preferred to urban but, as in Lyrical Ballads, rustics seem wiser than gentlemen. Jenner, Bloomfield tells us, had been dependent upon rural knowledge, on the local “tradition” known to Gloucestershire pastoralists that contact with cows prevented smallpox infection. But if this seems to make professional medicine secondary to rustic experience, Bloomfield soon suggests that Jenner had raised pastoral lore to the status of scientific truth. In the process, in Bloomfield's heroic portrait, he became godlike, giving healing law to the whole world. By the poem's climax, its pastoralism was neither radical nor levelling: vaccination did not lower men to the level of cattle; Jenner did not simply codify what cowherds already knew. Instead, through Jenner, the cowshed came to command the international stage:

Perhaps supreme, alone, triumphant stood
The great, the conscious power of doing good,
The power to will, and wishes to embrace
Th' emancipation of the human race;
A joy that must all mortal praise outlive,
A wealth that grateful nations cannot give.
Forth sped the truth immediate from his hand,
And confirmations sprung in ev'ry land;
In ev'ry land, on beauty's lily arm,
On infant softness, like a magic charm,
Appear'd the gift that conquers as it goes;
The dairy's boast, the simple, saving Rose!

(115-26)

In the image of the rose Bloomfield made the blister raised in the vaccinated arm into a symbol of natural beauty and fertility. Jenner, scattering vaccine roses, had become a romantic hero—a godlike genius who harnessed the hidden virtue of nature. Vaccination killed the “foul serpent” contagion and allowed villagers to “Love ye your neighbours” without fear of infecting their own children (237, 243). In other words, it restored Eden and allowed God's commandments to be lived out on earth. Jenner's “victory” over smallpox was an apotheosis of the pastoral life which Bloomfield declared himself uniquely fitted to celebrate:

                    Victory shall increase
Th'incalculable wealth of private peace;
And such a victory, unstain'd with gore,
That strews its laurels at the cottage door,
Sprung from the farm, and from the yellow mead,
Should be the glory of the pastoral reed.

(365-70)

Jenner saved Bloomfield's pastoralism (at least in the short term) by allowing him to maintain the idealizations that his gentlemanly public expected. In return, Bloomfield helped Jenner's publicity drive, assistance which Jenner relished. After the poem was recited to a special meeting of the Royal Jennerian Society, he rewarded Bloomfield with a silver inkstand. Later, he sent a silver tea-caddy for Mrs Bloomfield.

THE DOCTOR AS ROMANTIC GENIUS: JENNER, COLERIDGE AND SOUTHEY

As university-educated gentlemen, Coleridge and Southey were not to be so easily patronized as Bloomfield. Yet as enthusiasts for the healing power of nature and subscribers to Rousseau's idealization of childhood innocence, they were ready converts to the cause. As a father, Southey found ample reason to praise the discoverer of vaccination. In 1802 he declared “My little girl has taught me some new feelings: I have learnt to see beauty in that total absence of all thought and all feeling in an infant's face. As soon as there is good matter in town, she is to be inoculated for the cow-pox. I begin to think Dr. Jenner has not been rewarded as he deserves—that the sum was not enough for such a discovery—nor for a great nation to bestow.”²⁶ Coleridge agreed and gathered evidence from his reading to help Jenner prove his case for the “the identity of the Small & cow pox.”²⁷ Southey also used his pen to aid the cause. He reviewed Good Tidings favorably, taking the opportunity to publicize vaccination.²⁸

Like Bloomfield, the Bristol-based poets elevated Jenner to the status of scientific genius. In so doing, they viewed him in romantic terms derived from their own experience of medical experimentation. It was in Bristol that they had become involved with Dr. Thomas Beddoes, who was pioneering new forms of treatment (with Jenner's help) at his Pneumatic Institution and who became a strong supporter of Jenner.²⁹ Beddoes was a radical democrat, who pamphleteered against war with France and criticized aristocratic corruption in Britain's government.³⁰ His medicine had radical elements too, for like Jenner he speculated that disease was caused by the fashionable and luxurious lifestyles of the rich. “Fatal indolence” amongst the leisured classes weakened their constitutions, leaving them vulnerable to consumption.³¹ Like Jenner, Beddoes proposed a remedy that seemed levelling in its social implications, for he too had been putting pastoral lore to experimental test. Interested in the tradition that “stableboys and grooms … are … but little liable to consumption,” Beddoes sought to develop the healing powers of cows.³² He had consumptive patients housed in cowsheds, hoping that the atmosphere produced by the cattle's breath and manure would effect a cure. Joseph Priestley's daughter was one who endured this “stabling.” She wrote from her “Cow-House” that despite the “nauseous” stench and the “successive generations of flies” she had become “more than ever a friend to the cows” (quoted in Porter 106). Others were less enamored, complaining of the “disgrace” of being a “fellow-lodger with the cows” (quoted in Porter 106). Beddoes lamented one young lady who had died after refusing to spend a second winter closeted with cattle.

Beddoes' cowshed method exposed him to “ridicule” because it reduced well-to-do patients to the level of peasants living alongside beasts. Beddoes offered the alternative of introducing “vessels” containing cattle manure into the patient's apartment (quoted in Porter 106). But this only rubbed respectable noses, already offended by Beddoes' politics, in the dirt. Beddoes found the reputation of his medicine tainted by the way it violated the taboos on which the social and political hierarchy depended. Still worse, it did not work as the Bristol poets came to realize. Southey wrote in 1800, “This is a place of experiments. We have consumptive patients, in cow-houses some, and some in a uniform high temperature—and the only result seems to be, that a cure may sometimes be effected, but very rarely” (Southey Letters 1: 93).

Beddoes' cowshed method failed in practice, but so, argued Jenner's opponents, did vaccination. And in 1800 epidemiology was not capable of understanding theoretically how either would work. Based on rural tradition, the remedies of the West Country doctors seemed not only similar in origin, but similarly untested and unfounded on medical authorities. William Rowley attacked Jenner and Beddoes together—cow-pox madness had infected a medical profession that was already “Gas and vital air mad,” “Electricity and galvanism mad.” Jenner's medicine was like the “fanciful and extravagant celestial visions” of the “illuminati” (the mystical secret society suspected of fomenting political revolution).³³

Jenner and his supporters drew lessons from such attacks. Not only did Jenner steer clear of Beddoes' radical politics, but his publicists gradually replaced the levelling implications of his cow medicine with an emphasis on the doctor as a genius of nature. Coleridge and Southey had another Bristol scientist in mind as they made that emphasis—the young Humphry Davy, Beddoes' assistant. Coleridge wrote that he had “never met so extraordinary a young man” as Davy, and Southey encouraged him to write poetry as well as develop his science.³⁴ Davy responded with verse that embraced the idea of the discoverer as genius:

To scan the laws of Nature, to explore
                    The tranquil reign of mild Philosophy;
Or on Newtonian wings sublime to soar
                    Through the bright regions of the starry sky.
From these pursuits the Sons of Genius scan
                    The end of their creation; hence they know
The fair, sublime, immortal hopes of man,
                    From whence alone undying pleasures glow.(35)

Davy put his fine words into practice: it was by intervening in nature that he revealed previously unknown aspects of Creation and justified, in the eyes of his peers, the title of genius.

With Jenner vaccinating in Gloucestershire and Davy developing nitrous oxide in Bristol the West Country was suddenly at the forefront of science. In this heady atmosphere, it was the notion of genius that the poets created for Davy (and that he embraced) which they began to apply to Jenner too. Coleridge wrote directly to Jenner in 1811, telling the doctor that he congratulated himself that he had known men whom “Providence has gifted with the power to acquire” true fame by doing “what I could most have wished to have done” (Coleridge Letters 6.1025). Amongst these men he named Humphry Davy and Jenner himself. They were benefactors of mankind who would be justly revered by future generations. Jenner had gained a place in the romantic Pantheon of creative geniuses. According to Coleridge's excited theories, scientist and poet were engaged in a similar, prophetic, pursuit—harnessing the powers of nature by their imaginations, and so blessing mankind. Davy was a “man who born a Poet first converted Poetry into Science and realized what few men possessed Genius enough to fancy.”³⁶

If scientific thought was a kind of realization of poetry, poetry could be an exaltation of science. Convinced of Jenner's genius, Coleridge declared that he would lend his own poetic powers to the vaccination cause: “I have planned a poem on this theme, which after long deliberation, I have convinced myself is capable in the highest degree of being poetically treated, according to our divine bard's own definition of poetry, as ‘simple, sensuous (i.e. appealing to the senses, by imagery, sweetness of sound, &c.) and impassioned” (Coleridge Letters 6.1025). He never wrote the poem, but his enthusiasm for vaccination was sincere enough (he had also seen his family menaced by smallpox). He was well aware that enthusiasm would promote the spread of vaccination, if published in influential places. He told Jenner that he intended to write articles on the discovery in The Courier as it was “the paper of widest circulation, and, as an evening paper, both more read in the country, and read more at leisure than the morning papers” (Coleridge Letters 6.1025). Jenner responded appreciatively to the prospect of such favorable publicity: “his offer to me was very important” (Fisher 156).

POETIC CONQUEST: JENNER AS MILITARY HERO

Coleridge ceased writing for The Courier before he could write his articles praising Jenner. But he had by then already singled the doctor out as an example to the nation. In his journal, The Friend, he wrote, “Pronounce meditatively the name of Jenner, and ask what might we not hope, what need we deem unattainable, if all the time, the effort, the skill, which we waste in making ourselves miserable through vice, and vicious through misery, were embodied and marshalled to a systematic War against the existing Evils of Nature?” (The Friend 2.69). Jenner's science had become holy war: his conquest of evil offered an example, in Coleridge's moralizing scheme, to redeem Britons, high and low, from lethargy and viciousness.

John Williams agreed. His “Ode to the Discoverer of Vaccination” saw Jenner's work in heroic terms as a biblical battle against evil:

A fearful plague whose black envenomed breath
Loads the pure air with misery and death,
Dire as the pest that smote Thy servant Job,
Hath long run riot round this motley globe.
On beauty's native sweets profanely trod.
And marred, with cruel joy, the handiworks of God.(37)

Jenner came to believe in the truth, as well as the propaganda value, of publicity of this kind: by 1807 he saw himself as an inspired benefactor who deserved greater reward by the nation.

With Britain at war with Napoleonic France throughout the period in which Jenner was actively promoting vaccination, images of battle and conquest were not only current but patriotic. Portraying vaccination as a holy war ensured that Jenner's medicine appeared to the public as a cause for national pride. Bloomfield declared that, through Jenner, “England strikes down the nation's bitterest foe” and, “amidst the clangor” of Europe's war, ensures “new germs of life sprung up beneath the sword” (312-18). Jenner had become a military hero to make the nation proud of itself because it could fight the life-giving fight of vaccination as well as the life-destroying war with Napoleon. Vaccination became evidence of the value of the British civilization which was currently being menaced by the French. Coleridge told Jenner that he thought the idea of vaccination had been “inspired into you by the All-preserver, as a counterpoise to the crushing weight of this unexampled war” (Coleridge Letters 6.1025).

Coleridge and Bloomfield were not the only poets who portrayed vaccination as God's gift to Britain and Jenner as a native genius worth fighting for. Christopher Anstey's “Ode to Jenner” actually viewed the feared French invasion as an epidemic. The paternal Jenner could offer Britain victory over one disease, but not over the pestilence of Napoleonic imperialism:

But what, alas! avails the blooming boy,
His father's pride, his mother's only joy,—
The lovely virgin, or the well-earn'd fame,
And all the glories of the British name,—
If Heav'n has doom'd the downfall of the state,
And thy [Jenner's] protection but retards our fate
If France pursues her infamous career,
To spread the pest of her dominion here;
And if the blood of innocence must flow;
To grace the triumphs of a Gallic foe?(38)

War-imagery of this kind performed two functions at once. It promoted Jenner's medicine by elevating him to the status of heroic victor (a peaceful conqueror in contrast to the warlike conqueror Napoleon). It gave Britons motives to fight France—the civilization which produced and was protected by Jenner needed preserving from foreign political diseases. Vaccination thereby became enlisted as a key part of a nationalistic call-to-arms. Paradoxically, its very peacefulness became a cause for war. In the process, the patriotic loyalty of poet and doctor was established beyond doubt—a matter of no small importance for both Coleridge and Jenner because their past association with the democratic Dr. Beddoes left them vulnerable to charges of pro-French Jacobinism.

Southey had also been a democrat in his Bristol years. After 1800 he also wished to live down his reputation for radicalism. And he also used vaccination to do so. Where Anstey saw revolution as an infection threatening to spread from France, Southey viewed it as a disease that had already become endemic in Britain's laboring classes. He wrote in 1816 that

revolutions in the state are like the eruption in the small pox—the consequence of the disease pre-existent in the system—the body politic has been successfully inoculated for it, & the inoculation has taken;—the disease exists; & if it should not run the same course as in France, it will be because government can depend upon the army, & the Gentry of the country, Whigs & all, would rally round it in danger. But as far depends upon the opinion of the multitude, the work is done.³⁹

Here the actual success of vaccination in protecting against smallpox makes it a reassuring political metaphor for those afraid of a revolution by the disenfranchised. If revolution is an infectious disease, the immunization of the “body politic” (i.e. the enfranchised, gentlemanly classes) suggests that it can be contained. Here vaccination assuages Southey's political alarm and gives an air of scientific certainty to his hopes that revolution will be put down. It is an imaginative means of stemming political change. Southey, that is to say, uses Jenner to save the political status quo that he had himself earlier hoped to destroy. Vaccination, in Southey's reactionary prose, protects the political health of the nation.

Jenner was both topicalized and made respectably anti-democratic by Southey's politicization of vaccination. By 1815 Southey was Poet Laureate, the voice of the establishment. In this capacity he portrayed Wellington's victory at Waterloo as a divinely sanctioned victory of British good over Napoleonic evil. Later he celebrated Jenner in similar terms. In A Tale of Paraguay (1825) Jenner is a soldier against smallpox: he waged a “war … against the miseries which afflict mankind.”⁴⁰ He and the Duke of Wellington are warriors who “triumph'd once again for God and for the right” (Proem to A Tale of Paraguay, line 23). Fighting smallpox is here like fighting the ultimate enemy of British power: Napoleon and the revolutionary politics with which he threatened Britain and its colonies. Jenner is made a hero. He becomes a national savior as important, and as respectable, as the Iron Duke.

VACCINATION AND THE FIGHTING FORCES

Publicizing vaccination as a form of holy war would, of itself, have converted few to the cause had it not been so badly needed in the actual military campaigns Britain was launching against France. In 1797, Dr. Thomas Trotter issued a pamphlet called Medicina Nautica: An Essay on the Diseases of Seamen, where he wrote:

The ravages which this fatal disease have made … in our fleets and armies, are beyond all precedent: the insidious mode of attack, the rapid strides at which it advances to an incurable stage, point it out as one of the most formidable opponents of medical skill. It has offered the severest obstacle to military operations, which the history of modern warfare can produce.⁴¹

Like its close cousin, yellow fever, smallpox was a contagion whose reputation arose from Britain's experience of war—particularly in the tropics, where deaths from disease exceeded deaths in battle by a ratio of eight to one. In the early part of the eighteenth century, doctors had believed that people contracted smallpox through inevitable changes to the “innate seeds,” which formed a part of every human's anatomy. As the period wore on, military doctors observed at close hand the circumstances in which it spread.⁴² Smallpox and other diseases, they concluded, resulted instead from atmospheric changes or from small particles penetrating the body (perhaps an early version of germ-theory). Smallpox went from being a disease inside of the body, to one outside of it. This shift in perception turned the personal body political, and turned the purely medical, military. When pestilence stemmed from the body, people self-destructed. When it came from the earth and air, people were the victims of the environment. Military doctors branded it as an enemy whose methods for attack seemed beyond normal wartime decorum. Jenner himself referred to it with military terminology, as “that formidable foe to health.”⁴³

In fact, smallpox had waged its own biological warfare in the recent political past. In 1779, the French and Spanish sought to attack Britain in what historians refer to as the closest France had ever come to successful invasion. The French and Spanish fleets had lined up in the English Channel and dominated it for three days. When the time for attack came, however, neither the French nor the Spanish troops could move a muscle. The crews were weakened by smallpox. So much so, that bodies reportedly piled up in the Channel at such an alarming rate that villagers would not eat the harbor fish for over a month. The remaining crews turned home in defeat (Hopkins 73-74).

It was not only foreign troops who were weakened by disease. During the Napoleonic wars the British military was desperate to recruit more men. The navy found it almost impossible to keep ships' crews at full strength, despite constant use of the press-gang. Naval captains warned parliament that the war would be lost unless Britain's fleet could fight with a full and fit complement of men. The army, likewise, needed soldiers after losing whole expeditions to disease in the West Indies. The Commander-in-Chief of the army was Jenner's patron, the Duke of York. Here the campaign to convert the powerful to the vaccination cause had direct results: the Duke ordered the compulsory vaccination of regiments in 1800. In the same year, Gilbert Blane, formerly Physician to the Fleet and currently Physician-in-Ordinary to another of Jenner's patrons—the Prince of Wales—introduced vaccination into the navy. In the armed forces, patrons rapidly translated Jenner's desire to make war on smallpox into action. Vaccination first became institutionalized by the state in the hierarchical structure of the military, as part of reforms designed to impose mass hygiene on the ranks.⁴⁴ Winning the war against smallpox helped win the war against Napoleon and Jenner was praised for both.⁴⁵ In 1822 Blane remembered

those lately at the head of the navy and army, with that vigilant wisdom and humanity which become those who direct the affairs of a great and enlightened nation, recommended and enforced the practice of vaccination in both these departments, to the great furtherance of the public service. Their example has by no means been followed among the civil population of England.⁴⁶

THE POWER OF JENNER'S EXAMPLE

Blane's words reveal both Jenner's power and its limits. By 1815 Jenner's campaign had been successful. He was no longer an obscure provincial doctor, but a man acknowledged as a benefactor to mankind and rewarded by parliament. He had overcome objections that vaccination was revolutionary and defeated Moseley and the campaigns who had accused him of lowering humans to the level of beasts. His discovery had been adopted by the military and spread round the globe.

Yet the civil population of Britain had not offered their arms to Jenner's lancet. In part, their reluctance was a result of the way in which the vaccination campaign was organized. Jenner and his publicists had preached to the educated reading public. They had allied vaccination with the ruling classes—royalty, aristocracy and gentry. Here they had been successful: by 1815 vaccination was widespread amongst these classes. But although these classes had the power of patronage, this itself had limits. In the country, the laboring classes were tied to the lords and squires by relationships of deference. In the burgeoning cities, this was not the case, as Jenner complained in 1805: “in London my practice is limited to the higher orders of Society—In the Country, I can always find little Cottagers on whom I can introduce vaccine Virus in any form” (Fisher 147). Like Wordsworth, Jenner found the metropolis alienating because its social fluidity meant that his rustic vision was ineffective there. The lower classes in London could simply not be grasped, even when Jenner's notable patrons funded the Royal Jennerian Society to bring the benefits of vaccination to London's poor. By March 1805 it had performed only 6924 vaccinations in London; by roughly the same period 145,840 people had been vaccinated in Madras. The Society had failed to vaccinate on a mass scale because it expected candidates for vaccination to conform to a bureaucratic discipline of form filling and regular attendance at specified centers. Workers were reluctant or unable to meet these conditions: the Society's expectations were simply alien to the lives of those it set out to help.

Jenner never won the hearts of Britain's laboring classes—ironically enough since it was with rural laborers that he had begun. In the later Victorian period parliament created a centralized state bureaucracy through which vaccination could be imposed on the population as a whole. Vaccination was made compulsory and fines and imprisonment were the punishments for those who refused. But compulsion only bred resistance and a campaign to take “the parliamentary lancet out of the national arm,”⁴⁷ involving street protests and mass rallies, was successful by 1908. Vaccination had become the epitome of established, state control. It was resisted as an infringement of civil liberties by those on whom the government tried to impose it by force.

The seeds of vaccination's later history were sown by Jenner's publicity campaign. He had sold his discovery to the existing political elite and had relied on their influence and patronage to spread it. He had addressed that elite in person, but also through publicists writing for the press. Those publicists had aligned it with the anti-Jacobin politics of much of that elite—a politics that, in Southey's hands, revealed a deep need to impose order on the laboring classes (a need Jenner had come to share).⁴⁸ After 1800, then, vaccination was no longer simply imagined in the pastoral terms of the 1798 Inquiry. It was given a new public image as the divinely inspired discovery of a specifically British genius and as a holy war against infection—natural and political. It acquired a changed status in response to the need of Jenner and his allies to promote it (and to vindicate themselves) in a time of national and imperial strife with the forces unleashed by the French Revolution. With the aid of the poets, vaccination had become a remedy for multiple “infections.” Its discoverer had become a hero, to be revered (but also, by some, resisted) for his “Jenneration” of both nature and politics.⁴⁹

Notes

1. (London, 1798). All subsequent quotations from the Inquiry are taken from The Harvard Classics, ed. Charles W. Eliot: Scientific Papers. Physiology Medicine Surgery Geology (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1897) 153-80.

2. The World Health Organization has recently announced that polio will soon become the second disease to be eradicated.

3. The plate faces page 32 of the 1798 Inquiry.

4. Jenner's letter of 29 September 1798, quoted in Paul Saunders, Edward Jenner, The Cheltenham Years 1795-1823. Being a Chronicle of the Vaccination Campaign (Hanover and London: UP of New England, 1982) 72. Jenner's presentation of himself in pastoral terms is evident not only in comments such as this but in his refusal of the chance to cement his fame either by living in London or by exploring the Pacific with Captain Cook.

5. Jenner was an accomplished minor poet, whose pastoral verse in the Thomsonian tradition benefits from the detailed observation he practiced as a natural historian. These lines from “The Signs of Rain” are typical: “The boding shepherd heaves a sigh, / For see! a rainbow spans the sky. / The walls are damp, the ditches smell / Clos'd is the pink eye'd pimpernel” (lines 7-10), quoted in John Baron, The Life of Edward Jenner, 2 vols. (London, 1838) 1: 23.

6. Dr Haygarth, letter of 15 April 1794, quoted in Baron, The Life of Edward Jenner 1: 134.

7. James Watt, Jr., quoted in Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992) 163.

8. Baron, summarizing a conversation with the Royal Society's President, in The Life of Edward Jenner 2: 168.

9. The period saw the elaboration of comparative anatomy, which compared the bodies of animals with those of humans from different races in order to make “scientific” distinctions between them. According to the categorizations elaborated by William Lawrence, Petrus Camper and J. F. Blumenbach, black Africans were more “degenerate,” and nearer to the apes, than whites: see The Works Of The Late Professor Camper: On The Connexion Between The Science Of Anatomy And The Arts Of Drawing, Painting, Statuary (London, 1794), William Lawrence, Lectures on Physiology, Zoology and the Natural History of Man (London, 1822), J. F. Blumenbach, A Manual of the Elements of Natural History, tr. R. T. Gore (London, 1825) 37. Other theorists argued that blacks were a separate, inferior, species from whites. See Charles White, Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables (London, 1799) and Edward Long, History of Jamaica, 3 vols. (London, 1774), 2: 51-83, 383.

10. Here Jenner explicitly followed what he advertised as Hunter's discovery.

11. Jenner's suspicion of aristocratic luxury echoes a widespread eighteenth century fear, expressed forcibly by Gibbon, Cowper, and Thomson amongst others. See John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977). Mary Wollstonecraft symbolized the corruptions of luxury in the figure of the lady of fashion in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: Penguin, 1985) 254-59; Coleridge did so in his lectures on the slave trade of 1795. The lap dog is treated as a symptom of upper class women's diseased sensibility in Sarah Scott, The History of Sir George Ellison (London, 1766) and Jonas Hanway, “Remarks on Lap-dogs,” in A Journal of Eight Days' Journey (London, 1756) 69-70. For the medical argument that luxury was a danger to the body see George Cheyne, The English Malady. Or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases Of All Kinds (London, 1733).

12. On the influence of the new science on Frankenstein see Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), chapter 5.

13. Inoculation was introduced to Britain from Turkey in 1721 by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and helped to control a disease which, during the eighteenth-century, killed six European monarchs and an annual average of 300 per 100,000 persons in Britain.

14. Moseley, Treatise on the Lues Bovilla; or Cow Pox, 2nd edn. (London, 1805) 214.

15. Quoted in Robert Thornton, Vaccinae Vindicia; or, Defence of Vaccination (London, 1806) 4-5.

16. The new botany was also depicted by conservatives as an unleashing of female sexuality which undermined the social order. See Richard Polwhele, The Unsex'd Females: A Poem (London, 1798).

17. Details of the campaign, in which fifteen doctors joined Moseley in anti-Jenner pamphleteering, can be found in Paul Saunders (see note 4 above).

18. Mr. Stuart, quoted in “Review of Pamphlets on Vaccination,” The Edinburgh Review, 15 (January, 1810): 322-51 (343).

19. Benjamin Moseley's association of black slaves with wild beasts is apparent in his A Treatise on Sugar With Miscellaneous Medical Observations, 1st edn. (London, 1799) 169-80 and 2nd edn. (London, 1800) 167-68. His racist views are also apparent from his comments on Edward Long (see note 9 above), whom he called “the father of correct English-West-Indian literature” (2nd edn., 171).

20. By 1810 The Edinburgh Review was able to sum up the debate conclusively in Jenner's favor: “Review of Pamphlets on Vaccination” 15 (January, 1810): 322-51.

21. In 1819 Jenner declared “I wish Cobbett would change places with Tom Paine [whose bones Cobbett had brought from America in a box]—I would travel many a mile in the snow to put him in the Box.” Quoted in Richard B. Fisher, Edward Jenner 1749-1823 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1991) 277.

22. In a letter of 29 April 1802 to his trusted friend, Henry Hicks, Jenner drew a caricature of Pitt with a forked tongue below these verses “And gentle Reader woulds't thou know / What curs'd, what most malignant star, / Produced the Income Tax and War / Look at that Fellow's head below” (MS 5236 item 2, Wellcome Trust).

23. On Darwin see Alan Bewell, “‘Jacobin Plants:’ Botany as Social Theory in the 1790s,” The Wordsworth Circle 20 (1989): 132-39; on Priestley see Simon Schaffer, “Priestley and the Politics of Spirit,” in Science, Medicine and Dissent: Joseph Priestley 1733-1804, eds. R. G. W. Anderson and Christopher Lawrence (London: Wellcome Trust and Science Museum, 1987) 39-53.

24. From the Preface to The Poems of Robert Bloomfield, 2 vols. (London: Vernor, Hood and Sharpe and others, 1809) 1: ii.

25. Letter to George Bloomfield, 21 July 1802; in Selections from the Correspondence of Robert Bloomfield, The Suffolk Poet, ed. W. H. Hart (London: Spottiswoode, 1870 [facs. rpt. Walton-on-Thames, 1968]) 29.

26. Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, ed. John Wood Warter, 4 vols. (London, 1856) 1: 208.

27. The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1956-71) 2.852.

28. In the Annual Review for 1804, 3: 574. The Monthly Magazine said of the poem, “Mr. Bloomfield's genius burns with undiminished lustre. Nature marked him for a poet in his cradle” 18 (1804): 594.

29. Jenner had speculated that tuberculosis might “arise from our familiarity with an animal that nature intended to keep separate from man”—the sheep (see F. Dawtrey Drewitt, The Notebook of Edward Jenner in the Possession of the Royal College of Physicians of London [London: Oxford UP, 1931] 41). He passed his experimental evidence to Beddoes, who incorporated it in his publications on using gases to treat tuberculosis. Jenner, that is to say, influenced Beddoes' cow-house cure by communicating his findings, as well as by example. Beddoes rapidly became a convert to vaccination and campaigned for Jenner to be given a greater reward by parliament.

30. See An Essay on the Public Merits of Mr. Pitt (London, 1796) and Alternatives compared: or, What shall the rich do to be safe? (London, 1797).

31. Quoted in Roy Porter, Doctor of Society: Thomas Beddoes and the Sick Trade in Late-Enlightenment England (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) 103.

32. Thomas Beddoes, Essay on the Causes, Early Signs, and Prevention of Pulmonary Consumption For the Use of Parents and Preceptors (Bristol, 1799) 60.

33. William Rowley, Cow-pox Inoculation no security against small-pox infection (London, 1805) 5.

34. Quoted in Trevor H. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1981) 21.

35. “The Sons of Genius,” quoted in Trevor H. Levere, “Humphry Davy, ‘The Sons of Genius,’ and the Idea of Glory,” in Sophie Forgan, ed. Science and the Sons of Genius: Studies on Humphry Davy (London: Science Reviews, 1980) 33-57.

36. Coleridge Letters 5.309. See also The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, 2 vols. (London and Princeton, N.J.: Routledge and Princeton UP, 1969) 1.471.

37. John Williams, Sacred Allegories … to Which is Added an Anacreontic: An Ode on the Discovery of Vaccination (London, 1810).

38. J. Ring, A Translation of Anstey's Ode to Jenner (London, 1804) 10-11.

39. Quoted in Mark Storey, Robert Southey. A Life (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1997) 248.

40. Volume 7, Canto 1, stanza 2, in The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, collected by himself, 10 vols. (London, 1837-38).

41. (London, 1797) 322.

42. Donald R. Hopkins, Princes and Peasants. Smallpox in History (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1983) 9-13.

43. Jenner, A Continuation of Facts and Observations Relative to the Variolae Vaccinae, or Cow Pox (London, 1800), in Harvard Classics, ed. Eliot 231.

44. Blane and Thomas Trotter introduced vaccination to the navy as part of reforms instituted by Admiral St. Vincent designed to impose sanitation on the fleet. It was through these reforms that doctors and surgeons increased their status in the navy, as they became officially responsible for inspection and supervision of crews. This official responsibility for imposing health through discipline anticipated the development of a similar role by civilian doctors. On the institutionalization of health discipline in the navy see Christopher Lloyd and Jack L. S. Coulter, Medicine and the Navy 1200-1900, vol. 3: 1714-1815 (Edinburgh and London: E & S Livingstone, 1961) 165, 349-52.

45. Thomas Alston Warren told his parishioners that “our brave Seamen and Soldiers could successfully ply the ropes, direct the cannon, and handle the musket, whilst undergoing this new Inoculation. Our enemies did not like this at all.” In An Address from a Country Minister to his Parishioners on the Subject of the Cow-Pox, or Vaccine Inoculation (Oxford, 1803) 7. In parliament, Admiral Berkeley and General Tarleton agreed that vaccination was helping to win the war: Tarleton declared that “in future ages, the glory of Dr. Jenner's fame will be superior to the trophied urn of the most renowned of warriors” (Charles Murray, Debates in Parliament Respecting the Jennerian Discovery [London, 1808] 5, 78).

46. Sir Gilbert Blane, Select Dissertations on Several Subjects of Medical Science (London, 1822) 354-55.

47. Hansard 146 col 722, quoted in R. M. MacLeod, “Law, Medicine and Public Opinion: The Resistance to Compulsory Health Legislation 1870-1907,” Public Law (1967): 107-28; 189-211 (211).

48. By 1819 Jenner had espoused an authoritarian paternalism with regard to the rural laborers that echoes Southey's and Wordsworth's later opinions. During the unrest of that year he declared “fortunately they have no leader—so that if tens of thousands were embodied they must be considered merely as a Mob. … However they would do a vast deal of mischief before the Corps of Hangmen had finish'd the business” (quoted in Fisher 278).

49. Words used by the Victorian Anti-Vaccination League, quoted in MacLeod 124.