ABSTRACT
Historians, such as Anne Marie Moulin, have drawn rather sharp distinctions between immunology and vaccinology, separating the theoretical exploration of cellular and serological immunity from the practical manipulations of vaccine material for disease prevention. Yet, until the last decade of the nineteenth century, concepts of immunity and nascent immunology were shaped primarily by the vaccinator’s lancet.1 Warwick Anderson, Myles Jackson and Barbara Guttman Rosenkrantz, in their article ‘Toward an Unnatural History of Immunology’, call for more research outside the entrenched genealogy of ideas that has come to define the history of immunology.2 is paper follows their lead in focusing on the inter-connected history of the developments in theoretical concepts of immunity and the methods for measuring and controlling vaccine quality achieved through the nineteenth century practice of smallpox vaccination.
