Please join for a Centre for History in Public Health seminar.
The seminar paper reports new historical research on the hitherto understudied third plague pandemic, of the early twentieth century.
The seminar paper discusses the plague vaccines and serums of the scientist Haffkine in the late 1890s. It then turns to a campaign disaster in India where deaths from a contaminated vaccine led to the failure of the first attempt at universal plague vaccination.
This seminar paper fills a gap in the history of vaccination which typically jumps from the implementation of smallpox vaccination in the mid-nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century campaigns against smallpox and polio. It is addressed both to historians of public health and global health, and to all with interests in vaccination today, who can learn from vaccine campaigns in the past.
Speaker
Kalman Rotstein, PhD Candidate, Binghamton University
