By the mid-twentieth century, smallpox had vanished from North
America and Europe but continued to persist throughout Africa,
Asia, and South America. In 1965, the United States joined an
international effort to eradicate the disease, and after fifteen
years of steady progress, the effort succeeded. Bob H. Reinhardt
demonstrates that the fight against smallpox drew American liberals
into new and complex relationships in the global Cold War, as he
narrates the history of the only cooperative international effort
to successfully eliminate a human disease.
Unlike other works that have chronicled the fight against smallpox
by offering a "biography" of the disease or employing a
triumphalist narrative of a public health victory,
The End of a
Global Pox examines the eradication program as a complex
exercise of American power. Reinhardt draws on methods from
environmental, medical, and political history to interpret the
global eradication effort as an extension of U.S. technological,
medical, and political power. This book demonstrates the
far-reaching manifestations of American liberalism and Cold War
ideology and sheds new light on the history of global public health
and development.