Expunging Variola The control and Eradication of Smallpox in India 1947-1977

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Sanjoy Bhattacharya is Lecturer at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London. He is the author of Propaganda and Information in Eastern India, 1939-45: A Necessary Weapon of war (2001), fractured States: Smallpox, Public Health and Vaccination Policy in British India, 1800-1947 (Orient Longman, Sangam Books, 2005), and several articles relating to the medical, social and political history of India.

Back of the Book

As a crucial component of the global smallpox eradication programme, which has been widely hailed as one of the greatest public health successes in the twentieth century, the Indian experience has some important stories to tell. Expunging Variola reveals these as it chronicles the last three decades of the anti-smallpox campaigns in India.

This wide-ranging study, based on extensive archival research in India, Britain, Switzerland and the United States of America, assesses the many complexities in the formulation and implementation of the smallpox eradication programme in the subcontinent. Rather than merely cataloguing the developments of this extremely complex exercise within the world Health Organisation headquarters in Geneva and the Indian central government in New Delhi, this book adopts a much broader perspective: it makes a conscious effort to provide a detailed view by including the accounts of WHO, governmental and nongovernmental personnel on the ground. In this manner, nuanced descriptions of important - and often controversial - situations are provided. Thus, apart from acknowledging the influence of national-, state-and district-level political, economic and social structures in continually reshaping the contours of the smallpox campaigns, this work also emphasises the crucial rule played by field workers in implementing and often reinterpreting health strategies proposed by Geneva and New Delhi.

Original not only in perspective but in material, based as it is on a wide range of sources which have never been exploited by academics before, Expunging Variola breaks new ground in the historiography of smallpox eradication in the subcontinent.