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Professor Anita Guerrini looks at how some eighteenth-century parents decided to subject their children to the risk of smallpox inoculation in the belief that they were acting in their best interests, whether for reasons of dynasty or affection or both.

How did a leading physician and Fellow of the Royal Society respond to a book, written in 1744 by the Bishop of Cloyne, on the restorative powers of tar-water? None too politely, as Rupert Baker discovers...

We hear from a PhD student at New York University about her project ‘Smallpox and Slavery: Morbidity, Medical Intervention, and Enslaved People's Lives in the Greater Caribbean’.

When inoculation against smallpox was introduced to Britain from the Middle East in the early 1720s, members of the Royal Society found themselves on the wrong side of both conventional wisdom and contemporary piety.