ASM has substantial collections of material relating to the history of microbiology, which are maintained in the Albin O. Kuhn Library at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. The collection has been acquired almost entirely through the generosity of our members, either through direct gifts of books, papers, photographs, etc., or through monetary donations which have been used to purchase items for the collection. Member donations accompanying their membership renewals enabled a recent purchase of more than 50 books, including a number of older volumes of interest. Three of these are described below, and additional material regarding these purchases is available online.
Woodville, William. Reports of a Series of Inoculations for the Variolae vaccinae, or Cow Pox; with remarks and observations on this disease, considered as a substitute for the small-pox. London, James Phillips and Sons, 1799.
Woodville (1752-1805) was physician to the London Smallpox and Inoculation Hospital from 1791-1805. An enthusiastic proponent of inoculation (or variolation) as a means of preventing smallpox, Woodville was very interested in Edward Jenner's 1798 treatise on the use of cowpox for the same purpose and sought to validate Jenner's claims. Using material from a cowpox outbreak in a London dairy, he conducted what was essentially the first large-scale clinical trial of vaccination. In Reports of a Series of Inoculations, he included 200 case histories, in which most of the individuals were subsequently challenged with variolation, to no effect. By 1802, he had vaccinated 7,500 individuals, with  about half being subsequently variolated without reaction.
Although Woodville's experiments played a large role in justifying Jennerian vaccination, he and Jenner did engage in something of a dispute. Many of Woodville's early vaccinees experienced a general eruption of pustules, a result inconsistent with Jenner's, and more typical of smallpox. Though they briefly disputed the possible cause and meaning of these eruptions, they eventually agreed that, while they might have been caused by the cowpox vaccine, it was more likely, given that Woodville conducted his experiments at the Smallpox Hospital, that they resulted from independent infection.
Scofield, Samuel. A Practical Treatise on Vaccina or Cowpock. New York: Printed by Southwick and Pelsue for Collins and Perkins, 1810.
Jennerian vaccination had a number of strong supporters in America during the early years of the 19th century. John Redman Coxe, the Philadelphia physician and apothecary, published Practical Observations on Vaccination, or Inoculation for the Cow-Pock in 1802, which is also in the ASM Collection. Benjamin Waterhouse, the first professor of medicine at Harvard, was perhaps the most effective proponent of the new practice, in part because his efforts had the active support of President Thomas Jefferson. Waterhouse published A Prospect of Exterminating the Small Pox in two parts (1800-1802.)
Impressed with the work of Jenner and Waterhouse, a number of physicians in New York City persuaded some local citizens to form an association in order to establish an institution for the provision of vaccination to the poor, to maintain a stock of vaccine material, and to disseminate the new knowledge of vaccination. They chose as their Resident Surgeon a recent graduate of Columbia College, Samuel Scofield.
In A Practical Treatise, Scofield surveys the progress of vaccination around the world, offers advice on identifying true cowpox, describes the appearance and progress of the vaccination site, offers methods for obtaining and preserving the vaccine material and for performing the vaccination, and describes Bryce's practice of a second vaccination as an alternative to the use of variolation as a test of acquired immunity.
Schieferdecker, Chr. Charles. Dr. C. G. G. Nittinger's Evils of Vaccination. Philadelphia: To be had of the Editor, or any respectable bookseller in the United States, 1856.
Despite the praise Jenner earned for the development of vaccination against smallpox, both during his lifetime and after, there emerged a long-lived and variously justified movement in opposition to the practice. Some objections were religious; others, in reaction to compulsory vaccination laws, were what we might today call libertarian; still others were associated with alternative forms of medicine. Christian Charles Schieferdecker was an American hydropathist who established the Willow Grove Water Cure in Montgomery County, Pa., and published a number of works on water treatment for diseases like cholera, typhus, and consumption. In 1856 he translated (and evidently self-published) Carl Georg Gottfrod Nittinger's Die Impfung ein Misbrauch (1853), and in a footnote on p. 32 offers a suggestion as to why he might have taken on that task:
I myself have been, in my younger years, repeatedly vaccinated; and as soon as I with my elastic constitution was exposed to infection, I got a very severe attack of confluent malignant small-pox, which infected again my whole vaccinated household.
A sample of Nittinger's argument:
"2. [The cause and the nature of the vaccine and of cowpox is not known]. . . . we physicians do, in reality, know nothing more about the cow-pox, than what the tempting country- Eva has told her admiring Jenner.
3. Of the effect of the cow-pox, or vaccination, we only know, that man and cow get sick and suffer from it. It produces clearly all the symptoms of a most thorough poisoning. Astrology is the moral disease and weakness of the Orient; the vaccination-faith that of the Occident. There are in the Occident, as well as in the Orient, blind gropers, who act without knowledge of cause and effect.
4. How the cow-pox-poison should insure man, we cannot even dream, far less physiologically think. When the believers of Metempsychosis [transmigration of the soul], the Tartars, swallow pills made of the excrements of their high priests,-as Forster and Hastings testify, -the filthy usage rests upon a deep thought, upon an idea;-but the vaccination?"
Nittinger's final chapter offers a retelling of the story of Adam and Eve, with the milkmaid no longer the "tempting country-Eva," but rather the serpent (click to see a PDF of this passage).
ASM members who would like to donate materials to the Archives/Center for the History of Microbiology are encouraged to contact the Archivist, Jeff Karr, at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
(tel., 410-455-3601).
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