The episodes of cowpox inoculation (1798) and rabies preventive treatment (1885) are celebrated as the landmark of modern medicine. Paradoxically, these two advances have been accomplished without any theoretical breakthrough in the understanding of immunity. Going further, they were made possible by a long past of empirical procedures among which smallpox inoculation played an outstanding role. The paper explores the paradox of 'Immunization without Immunology' and Pasteur's reconstruction of the past, through his successful use of a metaphor. 'Vaccine', originally linked (...) to the jennerian method, was meant by Pasteur to designate a general program of virus attenuation. The paper investigates the scientific factors accounting for why viruses played such a leading role in immunization. The longlasting immunity, the easy transmission from man to man characteristic of smallpox allowing in vivo experimentation, may explain how crude procedures of early immunizers shaped scientific ideologies and strategies of public health and family initiated modern 'vaccinology'. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to introduce the one hundred years of vaccination that has passed since Louis Pasteur first coined this generic term. According to the late Jonas Salk, vaccinology is a science encompassing all aspects of vaccine from its conception in the laboratory to its production by companies and its application and distribution in the field. In this historical survey I explore how vaccination never consisted of a simple and uniform application of a rational model, but rather (...) diverged along various pathways, several of which were discarded in retrospect as being hazardous, and I analyse the ongoing interplay between rational and inventive thinking. (shrink)