Heil und Verderben

Abstract

This article explores the early cultural and literary history of vaccination – to be precise, the history of smallpox vaccination in the late 18th and early 19th century where the transition from the dangerous technique of smallpox inoculation to the rather harmless one of cowpox inoculation took place. The establishment of cowpox vaccination – developed by British country doctor Edward Jenner – was accompanied by an immense wave of popularization in all European countries. It included public vaccination facilities and church sermons as well as didactic literature, articles in newspapers and journals as well as medical treatises, and, above all: creative literature and art. Poems in sublime style, dramas of sensibility, comedies and tragedies, etchings and caricatures appeared in Great Britain, France and Germany; they altogether formed a singular and forgotten ‚media hype‘ which was seriously Janus-faced: Jenner and his new technique of prevention were either glorified and transformed into a sacred gift of nature or, contrastively, demonized and declared as a hellish contamination and hybridization of the human body. Bearing in mind that this early vaccination entertainment was both fundamentally ambivalent and deeply emotional, one can draw analogies to our current Covid vaccination discourse and to the equally unsettling role that international mass media play here.