Tag: vaccination
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Ethical considerations in treating minors against the wishes of their parents
Vidushi SharmaDelhi, India When parents and medical professionals disagree on the treatment of minors (especially on vaccination), moral dilemmas arise. Such complex issues require careful ethical consideration in order to achieve a delicate balance between respect for parental autonomy and the wellbeing of the minor. This scenario raises fundamental questions about beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, and…
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John Walker, vaccinator extraordinaire
JMS PearceHull, England Medicine has bred many odd but audacious characters, eccentrics, polymaths and “truants.” One might argue that those characteristics attracted such people to careers in medicine: a chicken and egg dilemma. Conversely, some have argued that modern regulated uniformity has infected medicine and stultified originality. A little-known medical eccentric and heretic was John…
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“Killed By Vaccination”: the enduring currency of a nineteenth century illogic
Saty Satya-MurtiSanta Maria, California, United States Vaccine misinformation and anti-vaccination conspiracy theories are not new but have acquired a combative energy during the Covid-19 pandemic. Nearly all the arguments now raised against vaccination were known in the late nineteenth-century, and the vaccine objectors’ rhetoric shows striking similarities to that in use today. Smallpox vaccine opponents:…
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“An ounce of prevention”: past and present
Jack E. RiggsMorgantown, West Virginia, United States Donald R. NewcomerGlendale, Arizona, United States Being old and lame of my Hands, and thereby uncapable of assisting my Fellow Citizens, when their Houses are on Fire; I must beg them to take in good Part the following Hints . . . In the first Place, as an…
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When Darwin was wrong
John HaymanVictoria, Australia Charles Darwin (1809-1802) is rightly famous, not for the discovery of evolution but for revealing the mechanism by which it may occur, natural selection. He not only formulated this idea, but he also presented evidence to support it and put it forward in a readily understood manner that could be comprehended by…
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Oswaldo Cruz and the eradication of infectious diseases in Brazil
Robert PerlmanChicago, Illinois, United States In 1899, an epidemic of bubonic plague caused a crisis in the Brazilian port city of Santos. Ship captains were angry that their boats had to remain in quarantine and so denied that the disease was plague. They and others argued that this new disease was not as deadly as…
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The global journey of variolation
Mariel TishmaChicago, Illinois, United States Humanity has eliminated only one infectious disease—smallpox. Smallpox is a very old disease and efforts to prevent it are almost as old. They included a technique called variolation, also known as inoculation or engrafting, in which individuals were infected with live smallpox virus to produce a milder form of the…
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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and smallpox
JMS PearceHull, England There are few examples of people with no medical training who independently make significant advances in medical practice. One such person was the elegant, aristocratic Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762)—daughter of Evelyn Pierrepont, first Duke of Kingston-upon-Hull—whose portrait is in the splendid Library Room at Sandon Hall, Staffordshire. It was painted in…
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Vaccinating a young child
The entire household has assembled to watch a child being vaccinated against smallpox. Inoculation with material derived from cowpox lesions was still sufficiently novel to excite such interest. It had been first attempted in 1796 by Edward Jenner, who used the term vaccination because the Latin for cow is vacca and cowpox was called vaccinia.…