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/
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Acknowledgements:
Works in Progress & Coefficient Giving