Before Vaccines Had Trust: Variolation Risk and Public Resistance

Protection against disease began as a dangerous calculation. Variolation offered immunity at real personal and communal risk, while later vaccination promised a safer method without ending controversy. This history traces changing practices, evidence, regulation, and resistance from early inoculation campaigns to modern public health. It treats skepticism neither as timeless ignorance nor as a single movement, but as a response shaped by experience, authority, access, and competing ideas of responsibility.