Imagining inoculation: Smallpox, the body, and social relations of healing in the eighteenth century.

People in colonial New York adopted inoculation for smallpox as quickly and as thoroughly as did people anywhere in the British Atlantic world. Such adoption was not dependent upon the authority of formal medicine, but rather upon everyday epistemology. Inoculation became accepted as local knowledge because ordinary New Yorkers integrated it imaginatively into common ideas about the body and disease, reconceptualized its theological meaning, and incorporated it into familiar social relations of healing.