Recueil de pièces concernant l'inoculation de la petite vérole, & propres à en prouver la sécurité & l'utilité

First edition. A few head-piece vignettes, ornamental bandeaux, decorated initials, and tailpieces.

Contemporary full mottled sheep, spine with five raised bands, gilt panels and fleurons between the bands, gilt-lettered tan leather label, doublures of French curl paper, red edges. Upper corners lightly bumped, a few rubbed patches and small losses, a dampstain to the first leaves, a few minor paper losses to some leaves.

Published several decades before the results of Edward Jenner's research on vaccination, this collection brings together the principal texts on inoculation, the procedure that constitutes its direct forerunner.

In the eighteenth century, smallpox ravaged Europe, accounting for nearly 10% of all deaths and rising to between 30 and 60% during epidemic outbreaks in France, a fact that explains the intensifying research undertaken to curb its effects. Doctors Emmanuel Timoni and Giacomo Pylarini, both physicians of Greek origin trained at Padua, were among the first Europeans to investigate inoculation as a preventive treatment. Both residing in Constantinople at the beginning of the century, they became acquainted with the procedure, already practised locally, which consisted of infecting a healthy subject, preferably a child, with a mild form of smallpox by administering a small quantity of pus taken from the pustules of an afflicted patient, thereby inducing a form of immunity. Independently of one another, they communicated their discoveries to England, where they were published by the Royal Society; their letters, translated into French, were incorporated into the present work.

In France, the first memoir on inoculation was presented by the scientist and explorer Charles de La Condamine to the Académie royale des sciences on 24 April 1754, only a few months before the present collection was approved by the royal censor. But the struggle to convince French public opinion of the soundness of inoculation had only just begun. Conceived by a mathematician, Jean-Étienne Montucla, and a physician, Pierre-Joseph Morisot-Deslandes, this collection was intended not only to relate the history of the method but also to assess its actual efficacy. Dangerous because its outcome was often unpredictable, inoculation was also decried for its Oriental origin. This argument is challenged in a 1723 letter by Doctor de la Coste, also transcribed in the collection:

 "We have seen, and we still see today, bigots and old women who cry out against this practice, because it comes from the Land of the Infidels, as if along with the smallpox one also inoculated Mahometanism."

Despite these arguments, states anxious to prevent the epidemics then ravaging their populations took up the method: the bourgeoisie, the nobility, and even members of royal families, including the heirs to the French throne in 1774, resorted to inoculation in special clinics. Although it was also practised on more disadvantaged and non-consenting populations such as orphans, the poor, and soldiers, it never became widespread owing to its high cost. This prompted, from the 1770s onward, the development of an alternative prophylactic method by the English physician Edward Jenner. Following the same principle as inoculation, Jenner infected his patients with the form of smallpox common among cattle, cow-pox or variolae vaccinae, which subsequently gave vaccination its name; generally mild in humans, this bovine disease protected the patient from the dreaded human smallpox.

Published at the outset of the struggle for the recognition of preventive methods against smallpox in France, this collection attests to a practice that would, a few decades later, pave the way for proper vaccination.