Vaccination: a history. From variolation to accination

by Hervé Bazin, Docteur vétérinaire, Docteur ès Sciences, Professeur émérite de la faculté de Médecine de l’Université de Louvain, Membre de l’Académie vétérinaire de France, Adel. herve-marie.bazin@wanadoo.fr

The human fight against infectious diseases has been developed following two orientations, one being hygiene with the distribution of drinking water, the purification of polluted water, institution of quar-antine for ill or suspected person, the other being the preventive inoculations: variolation and vaccination (immunization). This presentation deals with these last methods. The identification of similar pathological cases as rabies, smallpox or the bovine peripneumonia leads to the idea that some of them where conta-gious and could be transmitted naturally or artificially inoculated to normal subjects who were acquiring the very interesting property of non-recurrence of this disease.

Bull.soc.fr.hist.méd.sci.vét., 2012, 12 : 133-149