Shot in the Arm

In To-morrow, dated August 1803, the Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth portrays a couple weighing the pros and cons of various preventive measures against smallpox. The wife, Lucy, wants to have her only son inoculated in the “common way,” by which she means variolation, a mild but (hopefully) preventive infection. Her husband, Basil, knows there’s something a little more cutting-edge out there: “I think we had better have him vaccined.”

Edgeworth, a literary celebrity in her day, was writing just five years after Edward Jenner first described vaccination, in An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, and the technique’s efficacy was still under review by the Royal College of Physicians. In her novella, she paints Basil as a learned man who keeps up with the papers, a man who sees tremendous potential in medical advancement. But despite being...