Before vaccines became routine, they were risky experiments. In this episode, Jacob and Saloni travel back to the world of smallpox, cowpox, and cow-based “vaccine farms” to see how scientists stumbled toward the first vaccines against infectious diseases: smallpox, rabies, TB, polio, and more. Through the stories of milkmaids and aristocrats, secret lab notebooks, microscopes and cell culture, they explore how trial and error turned gruesome folk practices into the science of immunization, and how it all began with a single pustule.

Hard Drugs is a new podcast from Works in Progress and Coefficient Giving about medical innovation presented by Saloni Dattani and Jacob Trefethen.

You can watch or listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

Saloni’s substack newsletter: https://www.scientificdiscovery.dev/

Jacob’s blog: https://blog.jacobtrefethen.com/

Books:

Gerald Geison (1995) The private science of Louis Pasteur
Thomas D. Brock (1998) Robert Koch: a life in medicine and bacteriology
Mervyn Susser and Zena Stein (2009) Eras in epidemiology : the evolution of ideas
Angela Leung (2011) Chapter: “Variolation” and vaccination in late Imperial China, ca. 1570–1911. History of vaccine development by Stanley Plotkin
Florian Horaud (2011) Chapter: Viral vaccines and cell substrate. History of vaccine development by Stanley Plotkin
Samuel Katz (2011) Chapter: The role of tissue culture in vaccine development. History of vaccine development by Stanley Plotkin
Hervé Bazin (2011) Chapter: Pasteur and the birth of vaccines made in the laboratory. History of vaccine development by Stanley Plotkin

Articles:

Andrew Shattock et al. (2024) Contribution of vaccination to improved survival and health: modelling 50 years of the Expanded Programme on Immunization https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)00850-X/fulltext
Saloni Dattani (2020) The story of Viktor Zhdanov https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-story-of-viktor-zhdanov/
José Esparza et al. (2020) Early smallpox vaccine manufacturing in the United States https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2020.05.037
Paula Gottdenker (1979) Francesco Redi and the fly experiments https://www.jstor.org/stable/44450950
Donald Angus Gillies (2016) Establishing causality in medicine and Koch’s postulates
Burt A Folkart (1993) Dr. Albert Sabin, Developer of Oral Polio Vaccine, Dies https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-03-04-mn-283-story.html
Saloni Dattani (2025) Measles leaves children vulnerable to other diseases for years https://ourworldindata.org/measles-increases-disease-risk

Acknowledgements:

Aria Babu, editor at Works in Progress
Graham Bessellieu, video editor
Abhishaike Mahajan, cover art
Atalanta Arden-Miller, art direction
David Hackett, composer

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The history of vaccines

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