' To Bring Them under Control'

Abstract

This dissertation explores medical professionalization, public health, and vaccination in England, India, and Jamaica in the nineteenth century. England was the site of the most sustained anti-vaccination agitation of any British possession in the second half of the nineteenth century. Yet by the early twentieth century, the medical profession was a trusted authority and vaccination enjoyed wide public support. In India and Jamaica, we find the opposite. India and Jamaica did not have organized resistance to vaccination on the scale of England, yet vaccination and public health floundered in both areas. In England and the Empire, doctors had a trust problem. New technology and expanding health legislation sparked backlash against the medical community. How doctors responded to that backlash shaped public health and influenced medical authority into the twentieth century. By analyzing the role of trust in the process of medical professionalization in a comparative framework, my dissertation allows us to analyze how medical authority is created and functions in society.