The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century

Toward an immunological turn in nineteenth‐century studies

“…In conjunction with these more metaphorical, “imagined immunities,” historians of medicine, literary historians, and cultural studies scholars have turned to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when vaccination became popularized in Britain and America 16 . Edward Jenner, the Gloucestershire doctor credited with pioneering vaccination with his 1798 An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae , has since become the subject of multiple biographies, bibliographies, collected letters, and material and cultural histories of vaccination's global eradication of smallpox (Baxby, 1981; Bazin, 2000; Bennett, 2008, 2020; Bowers, 1981; Drewitt, 2013; Fisher, 1991; Glynn, Glynn, 2004; Jordanova, 2000; Le Fanu, 1951, 1985; Mallory‐Kani, 2014; Nussbaum, 2003; Rusnock, 2002, 2008, 2009; Saunders, 1982; Williams, 2010). These accounts trace Jenner's transition from ornithologist to “the father of immunology” and later president of the Royal Jennerian Society that promoted vaccination across Britain.…”

Of mermaids and monsters: Transgender history and the boundaries of the human in eighteenth‐ and early‐nineteenth‐century Britain

“…25 Following Felicity Nussbaum's work on bodily 'anomaly' and 'the human' in the eighteenth century and Gill-Peterson and C Riley Snorton's analyses of the relationship between trans history and the history of race and racism, I understand trans history as impossible to parse out from these intersecting forms of difference. 26 My aim, therefore, is to understand how these shifting markers of difference constituted 'the human' and what trans historians might gain from focusing on its boundaries. Where better to begin than the abode of mermaids, the fluid boundaries of the coastline and the vast oceans that connect supposedly discrete and bounded spaces of land?…”