Locating therapeutic vaccines in nineteenth-century history / Christoph Gradmann

This essay places some therapeutic vaccines, including particularly the diphtheria antitoxin, into their larger historical context of the late nineteenth century. As industrially produced drugs, these vaccines ought to be seen in connection with the structural changes in medicine and pharmacology at the time. Given the spread of industrial culture and technology into the field of medicine and pharmacology, therapeutic vaccines can be understood as boundary objects that required and facilitated communication between industrialists, medical researchers, public health officials, and clinicians. It was in particular in relation to evaluation and testing for efficacy in animal models that these medicines became a model for twentieth-century medicine. In addition, these medicines came into being as a parallel invention in two very distinct local cultures of research: the Institut Pasteur in Paris and the Institut für Infektionskrankheiten in Berlin. While their local cultural origins were plainly visible, the medicines played an important role in the alignment of the methods and objects that took place in bacteriology research in France and Germany in the 1890s. This article assesses the two locally specific regimes for control in France and in Imperial Germany. In France the Institut Pasteur, building on earlier successful vaccines, enjoyed freedom from scrutinizing control. The tight and elaborate system of control that evolved in Imperial Germany is portrayed as being reliant on experiences that were drawn from the dramatic events that surrounded the launching of a first example of so-called "bacteriological medicine," tuberculin, in 1890..

Medienart:

E-Artikel

Erscheinungsjahr:

01 June 2008

2008

Erschienen:

01 June 2008

Enthalten in:

Zur Gesamtaufnahme - volume:21

Enthalten in:

Science in context - 21(2008), 2, Seite 145-160

Sprache:

Englisch

Beteiligte Personen:

Gradmann, Christoph, 1960- [VerfasserIn]

Links:

Volltext [lizenzpflichtig]

Themen:

Diphtheria
Diphtheria Antitoxin
France
Germany
History, 19th Century
Human Experimentation
Humans
Vaccines

Anmerkungen:

Gesehen am 14.05.2021

Umfang:

16

doi:

10.1017/s026988970800166x

funding:

Förderinstitution / Projekttitel:

PPN (Katalog-ID):

1757777040