Vaccinating Britain Mass Vaccination and the Public Since the Second World War
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Gareth Millward is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of WarwickVaccinating Britain shows how the British public has played a central role in the development of vaccination policy since the Second World War. It explores the relationship between the public and public health through five key vaccines – diphtheria, smallpox, poliomyelitis, whooping cough and measles-mumps-rubella (MMR). It reveals that while the British public has embraced vaccination as a safe, effective and cost-efficient form of preventative medicine, demand for vaccination and trust in the authorities that provide it has ebbed and flowed according to historical circumstances. It is the first book to offer a long-term perspective on vaccination across different vaccine types. This history provides context for students and researchers interested in present-day controversies surrounding public health immunisation programmes. Historians of the post-war British welfare state will find valuable insight into changing public attitudes towards institutions of government and vice versa.
An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.
Introduction
Part I: The development and evolution of the vaccination programme
1 Diphtheria
2 Smallpox
3 Poliomyelitis
Part II: Vaccination crises
4 Pertussis
5 MMR
Conclusion
Index
Vaccinating Britain explores how the British public has played a central role in the development of vaccination policy since the Second World War. Using government sources, newspapers, internet archives and medical texts, the book explores the relationship between the public and public health through five key vaccines – diphtheria, smallpox, poliomyelitis, whooping cough and measles-mumps-rubella (MMR).
While the British public has embraced vaccination as a safe, effective and cost-efficient form of preventative medicine, demand for vaccination – and trust in the authorities that provide it – has ebbed and flowed according to historical circumstance. Moreover, the British public has never behaved as a single unit, with various groups making their presence felt and demanding changes from local and national government. Millward shows how modern attitudes towards vaccination, and the administrative bureaucracies necessary for their administration, have their origins in the vaccine programmes of the 1940s and 1950s. He goes on to analyse the controversies over the whooping cough and MMR vaccines, which show that while parents trusted vaccination as a concept, bad publicity both revealed and stimulated a lack of confidence in medicine and the British welfare state.
This volume breaks from the tradition of the single-vaccine case study and looks at attitudes across time and vaccine in a ground-breaking comparative work. It is a valuable resource for health researchers and students interested in the background to modern vaccination, as well as offering new insights for historians of public health, British policymaking and the post-war state.