Considering pandemics, history, and ethics

Abstract

The covid-19 pandemic, along with the debate concerning vaccines, has deeply affected my own views on my work as well as the interest it has received. I am currently writing my doctoral thesis on medical science, mentalities, public health measures, and epidemic prevention in the Swedish kingdom in 1695–1809. Much of my work concentrates on the long shadows of demographic catastrophes. I argue that the quickly growing interest in issues regarding public health and population in mid-eighteenth-century Sweden was to a large extent a consequence of the devastating crises of the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century. Smallpox inoculation and, at the end of the eighteenth century, vaccination, are central themes in my research. It has been quite frustrating and at times surreal to encounter, in present-day discourse, anti-vaccine rhetoric and arguments that are eerily similar to the ones I have seen countless times in eighteenth-century sources. Three centuries ago, when smallpox inoculation first began to gain interest in European medical and public discussions, the accusations of it being unnatural, harmful, and against divine will immediately surfaced – and never really disappeared. Inoculation, and later, vaccination, was sometimes even seen as a conspiracy, and across Europe extensive anti-inoculation and anti-vaccination propaganda was circulated, often on religious grounds. To see such viewpoints now being spread consciously and outright maliciously by conspiracy theorists, despite the immeasurable lives that vaccines have saved globally, has been gravely disheartening. It has, however, also made it clearer to me that historical research on these topics has immediate relevance to our own time. At the beginning of my doctoral studies, I often encountered surprised reactions to my chosen topics. Why study such sad themes? Historical demography is sometimes seen as tiresome and with little immediate value. Recently, I have