Civil War

Shortages of smallpox vaccine led to use of healthy black children and infants as source of uncontaminated “vaccine matter,” i.e., lymph from pustules, followed Confederacy’s decision to vaccinate the entire army. Lymph obtained from soldiers was often contaminated, and led to syphilis and other infections, hence the use of “dispossessed populations as vaccine intermediaries” (143-145). The practice was also used by the Union, especially in border states like Missouri, where, at St. Louis’s Benton Barracks, Union doctors “viewed formerly enslaved children as the ideal population to harvest lymph.” After the War, Northern USSC doctors like Elisha Harris, drew on findings of Southern doctors like Bolton based on use of enslaved children, that is, “the postwar concern to promote epidemiological understandings of effective smallpox vaccination methods united physicians from the North and South. . . . This collaboration meant that Northern doctors carried Southern racism into their analysis” (150).