A Pox on the Poor: The First Vaccine
Steven Shapin, 4 February 2021
In the British market for domestic labour, both inoculation and a personal history of smallpox counted as qualifications: you could then work safely with the employer’s children. Parish officials came to appreciate that a pox on the poor was a risk to the rich, badly affecting both bourgeois health and the availability of labour. Quaker ethics and general altruism were motives for the provision of free inoculation to the working classes, but economic self-interest was just as much a part of it.