The article explores the vicissitudes of the nineteenth-century introduction of the smallpox vaccine into Portugal's Indian colony of Goa. The choice to use smallpox vaccines instead of inoculation evinces local social dynamics and power networks that cannot be reduced to a colonizer-colonized duality but that interact with scientific issues and techniques imported from Europe and adopted locally. Official documents issued by health-service physicians and other administrative authorities reveal the actors involved in the fate of the smallpox vaccine, raising hypotheses about the motives (involving social, economic, technical, and political factors) that shaped their discourse and actions.
vaccine; variolização; Goa; colonial medicine; history of medicine
