Boilly: Vaccination as Party-Time

Oil on canvas, 1807 (Paris)
The Wellcome Library, London

Early on, both vaccination and variolation prompted gatherings that sometimes seemed like parties, as families and neighbors gathered to gawk at the outlandish procedure. Later, as the practice became more common, people gathered so that everyone in the same social circle might get it over and done at the same time. In Jenner’s childhood, that meant all the young boys in a town being variolated and then shoved into a barn for a month, quarantined until they were no longer infectious and thus dangerous to everyone else. In my lifetime, outbreaks of chickenpox — another (mostly) “one-and-done” viral disease — were treated the same way: when I came down with chickenpox, my mom and my aunt put me, my brother, and our cousins in the same room to play for an afternoon so that we’d all “get it over with.” Sure enough, all of us came down scratching in short order and got through it at about the same time.

Both the hardcover jacket and the paperback cover of The Speckled Monster show details from Louis-Léopold Boilly’s 1807 painting of a woman holding a young child at the moment of vaccination, while a whole household looks on, and the doctor stares intently at the child’s arm. It’s a painting all about watching.

As far as my book is concerned, the painting is a little anachronistic in clothing styles and — more importantly — in showing vaccination rather than variolation). On the other hand, the procedure was pretty much the same, save that the “matter” the physician in the painting would have used was, after Jenner, the cowpox virus (vaccinia) rather than the smallpox virus (variola major). But the scene of an entire household gathering around a child as a physician performed the operation played out countless times from 1721 well into the twentieth century, when vaccinations moved to more clinical settings.

Sharp-eyed readers might notice that the book covers reverse the painting.

When the book came out, one of my friends, Claude Bailey — a fine artist — made a version of this painting with my face substituted for that of the young dark-haired woman in the gray dress, second from the left. It hangs over my desk.