Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [239]-266).

This thesis explores the events and controversies surrounding the smallpox epidemic that hit Muncie, Indiana, in the summer and fall of 1893. The disease struck 150 individuals and left 22 dead, but it also raised broad questions regarding the authority of local and state public health officials to force vaccination upon citizens. Following recent historiographical trends that interpret anti-vaccinationist sentiment in Progressive-Era America as an important part of the political dialog, it argues that anti-vaccinationists in connection with the Muncie epidemic were not simply anti-modem, but had reasonable concerns as to the safety of smallpox vaccination and the government's authority to enforce it. / Department of History

Disasters are prevalent phenomena in the human experience and have played a formative role in shaping world cultures. Contemporary and popular conceptions of disasters as events, such as hurricanes, droughts, or earthquakes, fail to fully capture the social dimensions of these complex processes. Building on theoretical models and research in sociology, geography, and anthropology, this research explores one community's experience with and reaction to disaster over the longer-term--primarily through the lens of archaeology. The anthropology of disaster recognizes that these processes have the potential to affect every facet of human life, including biological, technological, ritual, political, social, and economic aspects of a society. How groups react to and cope with these processes dramatically shapes their cultural histories and in some instances their cultural identities. Using theoretical assumptions from the anthropology of technology, my research explores the social impacts of disaster at community and sub-community levels by drawing on method, theory, and information from across subdisciplinary boundaries to incorporate archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic datasets to better understand the entire disaster process or cycle. Specifically, I investigate how Hidatsa potters located near the Knife River of North Dakota responded to the smallpox epidemics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and how these women maintained or modified their daily practice in light of these catastrophes. In addition, I examine oral tradition and contemporary discourse on these subjects to explore the lasting legacies and impacts of catastrophe. The objective of my research is to contribute new theory to the anthropology of disaster by examining disasters over the long-term, investigating the relationship between disaster and motivations for the production or reproduction of material culture--the focus of most archaeological studies--and by exploring the role of materiality and traditional technology in coping strategies.

Utilizing medical manuals, medical records, newspapers, and letters, the history of the management of epidemics from 1803-1902 will be explored. This thesis weaves together and explores the political history of the nineteenth century by analyzing the contribution of doctors and reformers in the management of diseases. This thesis explores the intersection between the construction of a public health system and the implementation of these practices by political actors and physicians. The history of the management of disease is analyzed from the introduction of the mass vaccination campaign, in Spain, in 1803. This thesis first analyzes the development of a public health system focused on prevention. It then challenges the system created by examining how effective these measures were against the multiple waves of cholera to hit Spain. It then addresses the important role reformers had in the late nineteenth century. It was through their efforts that doctors and reformers became explicitly linked to new ideas of citizenship and responsibility. This paper emphasizes both continuity in the importance of health care, but also the transformations in the discourse of public health responsibility. Ultimately, it centers liberalism and an emerging middle class within the discussion of a health policy.

Thesis--Universidad de Sevilla. / "Apéndice demografico": p. 134-180. Includes bibliographical references (p. 132-134).

Thesis--Universidad de Sevilla. / "Apéndice demografico": p. 134-180. Includes bibliographical references (p. 132-134).

In 1911, the Uruguayan Parliament approved a law of mandatory smallpox vaccination. It was a controversial measure that generated a strong anti-vaccination campaign, led by the naturist movement. Embracing a transcendental understanding of nature, they saw vaccines and surgeries as a threat to the natural balance between body and soul. In this dissertation, I study how Uruguayan naturists positioned themselves as a secular alternative to science that combined reason and spirituality, and I show how they had a documented impact on the local political and scientific culture. By focusing on a country with a distinct anti-clerical tradition, I bring to the fore how apparently contradictory phenomena like secularity and spirituality overlap. The spirituality imbricated in their idea of nature, I conclude, resulted in conservative political gestures, even within progressive movements. Among many other things, they embraced a language of purity and sacredness around the body, both human and animal, that led them to the opposition to vaccinations, surgeries and meat consumption, which they regarded as violent moral transgressions. The influence of naturism in the country has not yet been sufficiently considered, and my research presents a first approach to a central aspect of the intellectual life of the period. Besides being a popular movement, it influenced key political, scientific and cultural figures, who, in turn, shaped laws, scientific policies and the elite’s understanding of science and its possibilities. To demonstrate this, through a cultural studies perspective, and in dialogue with science and technology studies and medical humanities, I do close-readings of an unexplored archive of naturist and theosophist periodicals, pamphlets and books published in the first two decades of the 20th century. I also study more well-known anarchist publications and philosophical works by prestigious medical doctors, such as Mateo Legnani (1884-1964), and Carlos Santín Rossi (1884-1936), both close to naturism, focusing on how they also represent an alternative body of knowledge where scientific thought and spirituality coalesce. I conclude by studying essays by the Spanish-Paraguayan writer Rafael Barrett (1876-1910), who debated with the Uruguayan naturists and wrote illuminating pieces on the issue. To this end, I structure the dissertation in three chapters. In the first one, I discuss the political impact of naturism and argue that the movement’s opposition to the 1911 law of compulsory smallpox vaccination highlighted the Government's tendency to subordinate individual freedoms, a fundamental principle of the newly formed liberal state, to what they saw as the common good, which contradicted the Government’s modernizing discourse and agenda. Moreover, naturists formulated some well-founded systematic critiques of the political values imbricated in academic medicine. By pointing this out, I challenge the opposition between them and university trained physicians, the latter historically represented as defenders of science and reason, and the former as religious fanatics. Indeed, the public health paradigm adopted by medical authorities appealed to nature in a very similar way than naturists did. Several renowned medical doctors, some of them parliamentary representatives, without openly identifying themselves as such made direct references to naturists’ precepts in their books and in public documents, including law bills. The second chapter revolves around the vision of science developed by naturism and its political and epistemological implications; there, I argue that while naturists amplified the metaphysical elements present in the history of medicine, from vitalism to Neo-Hippocratism and romanticism, such spiritual views remained compatible with the anticlericalism that characterized the Uruguayan society. I study two iterations of the movement that represent different understandings of science and that reveal specific political and philosophical tensions present in Uruguayan society. One of them, led by Antonio Valeta (1882-1945), proposed an accessible version of science, highlighting the autonomy of the individual. He appealed to values of freedom and personal effort that were part of the liberal imaginary and came into tension with the centrality of the state and its reformist agenda. The second one was developed by Fernando Carbonell (1880-1947), a member of the Theosophical Society and other esoteric groups. His vision was informed by a sophisticated system of beliefs, composed of mystical and conceptually dense metaphysical, ethical and aesthetic teachings that led to valid epistemological criticisms to the model of laboratory science that was being embraced by the authorities. In the third and final chapter, elaborating on the fact that naturists and other groups across the political spectrum mobilized a secular spirituality inherent to the idea of nature, I posit that this led to conservative political positions, even within progressive movements and individuals that were attracted to naturist precepts. Indeed, naturism explicitly opposed actions that could be considered revolutionary in favor of a gradual evolutionism, appealing to the same principle of non-violence embraced in their vegetarianism. In turn, they elevated the philosophical and metaphysical purity of the defense of the life of all beings above the actual living conditions of people and human suffering, romanticizing poverty and illiteracy as states closer to nature. To conclude, my dissertation brings attention to the diversity of belief systems and values still at stake in the present-day scientific landscape. Current iterations of naturism, as illustrated by the anti-vaccination movement both in Uruguay and internationally, resort to claims and arguments eerily similar to those developed more than 100 years ago in Montevideo and other parts of the world. Now, as they did in the past, activists advocate for individual freedom and against the intervention of foreign substances that alter the natural balance of their bodies. Moreover, within the context of the coronavirus pandemic, scientific discussions are taking over the public sphere in an unprecedented way, echoing past dynamics where public figures denounced scientists as biased and despotic elitists who wanted to subject the people to their arbitrary regulations.

Este trabalho tem por objetivo discutir os impactos da varíola em Porto Alegre no século XIX, tendo como ponto de partida as ações protagonizadas pelos diferentes sujeitos que vivenciaram, à época, a experiência da doença e das posturas que se estabelecem contra ela. Em 1846, regulou-se a vacinação contra a varíola como prática de Estado; a recepção da nova lei, entretanto, não alcançou a notoriedade esperada por agentes do governo imperial, já que a ampla maioria da população não estava informada dos propósitos da vacina e não conferia legitimidade à medida. Observando o perfil social dos variolosos percebe-se que aqueles sujeitos, protagonistas dos conflitos de seu tempo foram capazes de elaborar respostas próprias às demandas da doença, tendo buscado os préstimos do hospital Santa Casa de Misericórdia de Porto Alegre com vistas a aliviar seus sintomas. A recusa à vacinação foi constatada por meio de muitos relatórios governamentais no período, mas também ficou evidente mediante a observância da varíola como uma doença endêmica na cidade, que alcançou surtos epidêmicos graves, como no ano de 1874, quando 1% da população faleceu em função do contágio. Analisando as repostas elaboradas pelo incipiente “poder público” para o combate à epidemia, observou-se a inoperância das medidas profiláticas vigentes, já que o isolamento de pessoas, tido como necessário para a não propagação da doença, era regra para uma parte da população, majoritariamente sujeitos livres pobres e escravos, enquanto a doença atingiu indiscriminadamente todos os setores ou classes sociais. / This dissertation aims to discuss the impact of smallpox in Porto Alegre in the nineteenth century taking as its starting point the actions played by different subjects who experienced at the time the experience of illness and the attitudes that were established against it. In 1846, smallpox vaccination was regulated as a State practice, but the reception of the new law, however, did not reach the expected notoriety bythe agents of the imperial government, since the vast majority of the population was not informed of the purpose of the vaccine and did not confer legitimacy tothis measure. Observing the social profile of the carriers of smallpox, one realizes that those subjects, protagonists of conflicts of his time, were able to develop their own answers to the demands of the disease, searching the good services of the Hospital Santa Casa de Porto Alegre in order to alleviate their symptoms. The refusal of vaccination was found by many governmental reports of the period, but was also evident by the observance of smallpox as an endemic disease in the town. Indeed, smallpox reached serious epidemic outbreaks, as in 1874, when 1 % of the population died due of contagion. Analyzing the responses prepared by the incipient public power to fight the epidemic at the time, we can observe the ineffectiveness of current prophylactic measures, since the isolation of persons was deemed necessary to not spread the disease. It was the rule for a part of the population, mostly poor free subjects and slaves, while the disease indiscriminately affected all sectors or social classes.

Este trabalho tem por objetivo discutir os impactos da varíola em Porto Alegre no século XIX, tendo como ponto de partida as ações protagonizadas pelos diferentes sujeitos que vivenciaram, à época, a experiência da doença e das posturas que se estabelecem contra ela. Em 1846, regulou-se a vacinação contra a varíola como prática de Estado; a recepção da nova lei, entretanto, não alcançou a notoriedade esperada por agentes do governo imperial, já que a ampla maioria da população não estava informada dos propósitos da vacina e não conferia legitimidade à medida. Observando o perfil social dos variolosos percebe-se que aqueles sujeitos, protagonistas dos conflitos de seu tempo foram capazes de elaborar respostas próprias às demandas da doença, tendo buscado os préstimos do hospital Santa Casa de Misericórdia de Porto Alegre com vistas a aliviar seus sintomas. A recusa à vacinação foi constatada por meio de muitos relatórios governamentais no período, mas também ficou evidente mediante a observância da varíola como uma doença endêmica na cidade, que alcançou surtos epidêmicos graves, como no ano de 1874, quando 1% da população faleceu em função do contágio. Analisando as repostas elaboradas pelo incipiente “poder público” para o combate à epidemia, observou-se a inoperância das medidas profiláticas vigentes, já que o isolamento de pessoas, tido como necessário para a não propagação da doença, era regra para uma parte da população, majoritariamente sujeitos livres pobres e escravos, enquanto a doença atingiu indiscriminadamente todos os setores ou classes sociais. / This dissertation aims to discuss the impact of smallpox in Porto Alegre in the nineteenth century taking as its starting point the actions played by different subjects who experienced at the time the experience of illness and the attitudes that were established against it. In 1846, smallpox vaccination was regulated as a State practice, but the reception of the new law, however, did not reach the expected notoriety bythe agents of the imperial government, since the vast majority of the population was not informed of the purpose of the vaccine and did not confer legitimacy tothis measure. Observing the social profile of the carriers of smallpox, one realizes that those subjects, protagonists of conflicts of his time, were able to develop their own answers to the demands of the disease, searching the good services of the Hospital Santa Casa de Porto Alegre in order to alleviate their symptoms. The refusal of vaccination was found by many governmental reports of the period, but was also evident by the observance of smallpox as an endemic disease in the town. Indeed, smallpox reached serious epidemic outbreaks, as in 1874, when 1 % of the population died due of contagion. Analyzing the responses prepared by the incipient public power to fight the epidemic at the time, we can observe the ineffectiveness of current prophylactic measures, since the isolation of persons was deemed necessary to not spread the disease. It was the rule for a part of the population, mostly poor free subjects and slaves, while the disease indiscriminately affected all sectors or social classes.

Este trabalho tem por objetivo discutir os impactos da varíola em Porto Alegre no século XIX, tendo como ponto de partida as ações protagonizadas pelos diferentes sujeitos que vivenciaram, à época, a experiência da doença e das posturas que se estabelecem contra ela. Em 1846, regulou-se a vacinação contra a varíola como prática de Estado; a recepção da nova lei, entretanto, não alcançou a notoriedade esperada por agentes do governo imperial, já que a ampla maioria da população não estava informada dos propósitos da vacina e não conferia legitimidade à medida. Observando o perfil social dos variolosos percebe-se que aqueles sujeitos, protagonistas dos conflitos de seu tempo foram capazes de elaborar respostas próprias às demandas da doença, tendo buscado os préstimos do hospital Santa Casa de Misericórdia de Porto Alegre com vistas a aliviar seus sintomas. A recusa à vacinação foi constatada por meio de muitos relatórios governamentais no período, mas também ficou evidente mediante a observância da varíola como uma doença endêmica na cidade, que alcançou surtos epidêmicos graves, como no ano de 1874, quando 1% da população faleceu em função do contágio. Analisando as repostas elaboradas pelo incipiente “poder público” para o combate à epidemia, observou-se a inoperância das medidas profiláticas vigentes, já que o isolamento de pessoas, tido como necessário para a não propagação da doença, era regra para uma parte da população, majoritariamente sujeitos livres pobres e escravos, enquanto a doença atingiu indiscriminadamente todos os setores ou classes sociais. / This dissertation aims to discuss the impact of smallpox in Porto Alegre in the nineteenth century taking as its starting point the actions played by different subjects who experienced at the time the experience of illness and the attitudes that were established against it. In 1846, smallpox vaccination was regulated as a State practice, but the reception of the new law, however, did not reach the expected notoriety bythe agents of the imperial government, since the vast majority of the population was not informed of the purpose of the vaccine and did not confer legitimacy tothis measure. Observing the social profile of the carriers of smallpox, one realizes that those subjects, protagonists of conflicts of his time, were able to develop their own answers to the demands of the disease, searching the good services of the Hospital Santa Casa de Porto Alegre in order to alleviate their symptoms. The refusal of vaccination was found by many governmental reports of the period, but was also evident by the observance of smallpox as an endemic disease in the town. Indeed, smallpox reached serious epidemic outbreaks, as in 1874, when 1 % of the population died due of contagion. Analyzing the responses prepared by the incipient public power to fight the epidemic at the time, we can observe the ineffectiveness of current prophylactic measures, since the isolation of persons was deemed necessary to not spread the disease. It was the rule for a part of the population, mostly poor free subjects and slaves, while the disease indiscriminately affected all sectors or social classes.