Medical Modernization and Medical Nationalism: Resistance to Mass Tuberculosis Vaccination in Postcolonial India, 1948–1955

Abstract

In the fifteen years following World War II more was done to combat tuberculosis than at any other time in world history. On every continent, hundreds of millions received the BCG (Bacillus Calmette Guérin) vaccine and millions more benefited from newly discovered antibiotics. TB research and attempts to control the disease knit together disparate populations and places as a network of experts and a matrix of ideas spread out across the globe linking the world through a common vaccine, a battery of antibiotics, and a knowledge network. Medicine became internationalized as organizations like the WHO and UNICEF began to see diseases as global problems and not solely the concern of individual countries.