Vaccination in America

Beschreibung

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. 
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. 

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

Autor*in

Richard J. Altenbaugh

Themen in »Vaccination in America«

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

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“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)

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