Cultural Perspectives on Vaccination in the past and present

Abstract

Aims: The aim of the research is to indicate the cultural mechanisms hindering the implementation of wide-ranging preventative vaccination programmes, as well as showing their wider geo-historical background.

Methods: The research is part of a trend in folklore and cultural anthropology and its subdiscipline - medical anthropology. The author analyzes belief content, which includes iconographic materials, electronic library resources relating to the history of prophylaxis vaccine, and online statements of opponents of vaccination, using an interpretative approach which refers to the system of knowledge, values and analytical categories used by respondents to discover the reason for their actions.

Results: Illness as an unavoidable aspect of the biological nature of man, and is not only a medical, but also a cultural fact, just as the methods of fighting disease offered by modern advanced medical technologies, such as vaccination. People are trying to find a place for them in contemporary popular thinking, describe and interpret them according to some generally understood rules through a processes of mythologization. This process is based on the mechanism of creating secondary meanings, which are integrated into traditional motifs, symbols and patterns of thinking. The process results in certain health attitudes and beliefs, hidden in the legends of modern health folklore (rumours, urban legends, etc.), as well as in common thinking concerning medicine, doctors, illnesses and vaccinations. They show the health awareness of contemporary society.

Conclusion: Hospitals may improve patient outcomes by redesigning their processes. Studying them may show to what extent and how the knowledge of new medical technologies popularized through health campaigns filters into the common awareness and is absorbed. The reaction of culture to modern medical technologies is ambivalent, and mythologization is an attempt to “tame” new medical phenomena. Although it does not prevent this ambivalence altogether, it make it possible to find a place for them in the cultural universe.