Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c6.s2.11

c6.s2.11

So what, till the latter part of the eighteenth century, when practised universally in any tract, was a relatively effective method involving no contagious effects (since all were similarly inoculated), had begun to seem by 1800 a great hazard to the Europeans in Calcutta. But in spite of the bannings, prohibitions, etc. resorted to in Calcutta and other cities and towns, the introduction of vaccine inoculation was very halting. Such halting development must have been caused by insufficient provision of resources or by sheer indifference. Or, as hinted by the officiating Superintendent General of Vaccination for N.W.P. (the present U.P.) in 1870, it may also have been caused by the peoples’ reluctance to get vaccinated as, according to this authority, the indigenous inoculation possessed ‘more protective power than is possessed by vaccination performed in a damp climate.’28 Whatever the causes, the indigenous inoculation seems to have been still practised around 1870. For areas near Calcutta, those who were not so inoculated are estimated at 10 per cent of the population around 1870, and for the Benares area at 36 per cent.29 The frequent smallpox epidemics which were rampant in various parts of India in the nineteenth and early twentieth century may largely be traced back, on the one hand, to the state’s backwardness and indifference in making the requisite arrangement for universal vaccination; and on the other hand, to having made the existence of the indigenous practice of inoculation most difficult not only by withdrawing all support for it, but also forcing it to be practised secretly and stealthily.