Engendering Risk and Responsibility: Negotiating Perceptions of Parenthood and Childhood in Enlightenment Debates on Inoculation

Victoria Meyer, The University of Arizona

Immunization practices have been the subject of heated debate since coming to the attention of Western European medicine in the eighteenth century. Controversy has endured due to the complex ethical, medical, legal, political, and social negotiations raised by a medical procedure to both give and protect from a deadly disease. Immunization decisions are inherently personal and communal as they address infectious diseases, starting with smallpox. While the COVID-19 pandemic publicized broad vaccine hesitancy, immunization advocates and opponents have focused on children since the eighteenth century. Smallpox remained epidemic and endemic in the eighteenth century and was a significant cause of childhood mortality and disability. The enduring debates over vaccination thus provide a window into the creation and projection of childhood, parenthood, and health during each era. We will focus on how parents, philosophes, and physicians in eighteenth-century England and France negotiated ideas of childhood, health, and parental responsibilities through the debates on inoculation against smallpox. Inoculation was a risky procedure without foundation in contemporary medical thought. Questions about parental responsibility and care thus framed evaluations of risks and benefits. Many participants in the polemic built on their role as parents faced with an unprecedented decision for their children. Others relied upon their own experiences with smallpox as children. Inoculation against smallpox was at the convergence of physicians’ medicalization of childhood in the eighteenth century and an Enlightened sentimentalization of parenthood and childhood. We will explore how physicians, philosophes, and parents across the Channel grappled with perceptions of risk based on an emerging mix of emotion and reason during the Enlightenment. This strained amalgamation became part of modern decision-making about health at the core of continued debates about immunization today.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 130. Children's Health and the State