ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Immunity and Inoculation: Yaws Between Medical Systems, 1920-1950

• In Event: Health During and After the British Empire

English Abstract

When European doctors diagnosed yaws in colonised subjects, they frequently noted local practices of inoculating the disease or beliefs that catching it was necessary to progress to adulthood or protect from ill health. Such beliefs were noted among slaves in the West Indies in the eighteenth century; among newly “discovered” yaws sufferers in Ceylon and Fiji in the nineteenth century; and among those across the globe who resisted the WHO campaigns to eradicate the disease from the 1950s. Imperial and international health workers derided these customs; nevertheless, they found endorsement in medical journals, as Western experts concluded that yaws did provide cross-immunity against syphilis, with some suggesting that vaccine therapy might be usefully explored.

This paper, focusing on the British empire from the 1920s to 50s, uses the themes of inoculation and immunity to demonstrate the contestation between Western biomedicine and the local medical systems its practitioners sought to colonise. Despite expert validation of the theory behind inoculation, vaccination remained a path-not-travelled in biomedical treatment for yaws. Instead, cure via arsenicals and then antibiotics was pursued, regardless of fears—eventually realised—that eradication might lead to increased rates of syphilis. This paper argues that vaccination was inadequately explored partly to enforce epistemological hierarchies; partly because curative medicine was the favoured tool of development; and partly due to the nosological constraints of biomedicine. In recovering alternative historical understandings of yaws, this paper problematises the present as the WHO re-embarks on a campaign to eradicate yaws by 2030.

Author

• Philippa Monk, University of Oxford