Smallpox and Vaccines in the Nineteenth Century in Sweden

Abstract

Smallpox was a severe epidemic disease that took many lives in older times. The disease could be prevented medically, though, as a vaccine was developed in England at the end of the eight-eenth century. This was the only vaccine available against epidemic diseases in the nineteenth century. In 1816, vaccination of children became mandatory by law in Sweden and in Norway this had been the case since 1810. The last major epidemics took place in Stockholm in 1874 and in Gothenburg in 1892–1894.

For me as an ethnologist the question is how affected individuals and their environment have handled such times of disease. To gain an idea of how smallpox affected the lives of indi-viduals in different parts of Sweden, I have studied folk life records in archives in Gothenburg, Lund and Uppsala. They are from the twentieth century, recorded from informants born in the nineteenth century. In many cases they have told about their own memories where smallpox was involved.

There was horror and anxiety both in the affected homes and in the neighbourhood. The country people understood that it was necessary to stay away from houses where someone was sick. There was a belief in fate that served as an explanation as to why some people suffered from smallpox, and why some of them died while others survived.

The person giving the vaccine shots was often the parish clerk after he had received some medical instruction from a physician. The person giving the injection carved out a mark in the skin of the children’s arm and filled it with vaccine extracted from cowpox or from other human beings who had been sick.

In a regional study focused on the islands of Orust and Tjörn, north of Gothenburg, the issue is how the vaccination was carried out on these islands, and how this was related to different outbreaks of smallpox.