* Dr Andrew Roberts has contributed greatly to this article through his stimulating comments and the extensive documentation he has provided for East, Central and South Africa.

¹ Kittredge, G. L., ‘Introduction’ to Increase Mather… and Cotton Mather, Sentiments on the Small Pox Inoculated (Cleveland, 1921), 4.Google Scholar ‘Inoculation’ is used throughout this paper to refer to the process of transferring smallpox artificially from someone infected with the disease to someone who is not but hopes thereby to contract a mild case and subsequent immunity. It is synonymous with ‘variolation’, used in the modern medical literature but not in the eighteenth century. Vaccination refers to infection with cowpox to give immunity to smallpox and was first described by Jenner in 1796.

An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Connecticut Valley African Colloquium, Hartford, Conn. I am most grateful to Robert Farris Thompson for his perceptive comments and suggestions.

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⁵⁹ Ibid. I, 236. Monica Wilson wrongly refers to inoculation at Kaditshwane as ‘Vaccination’: Wilson, M., ‘The Sotho, Venda and Tsonga’, in Wilson, M. and Thompson, L. M. (eds.), The Oxford History of South Africa, I (Oxford, 1969), 150.Google Scholar But she would seem to be correct in taking it as evidence of ‘some contact with the coast’; see below, p. 557.

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⁸² The Kriges argue that the Lovedu use of the wrist or forehead for inoculation ‘supports the claim that it was known prior to the advent of the European; moreover, the ingredients of the serum used by Europeans are not known’ (Realm, 214). But here they seem to be referring to European vaccination rather than inoculation. They proceed to speculate that the Lovedu method was borrowed from the Arabs. In any event, the Lovedu continued to use their own method as late as the 1938 epidemic, ‘for, though it was realized that it “called” the disease instead of curing it, people noted that, despite European vaccination, there was still much illness’.

⁸³ Razzell, P. E., ‘Population Change in Eighteenth Century England: a Reinter-pretation’, Economic History Review, XVIII (1965), 312–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and idem, ‘Edward Jenner: The History of a Medical Myth’, Medical History, IX (1965), 216–29Google Scholar, as well as the rebuttals in the same and succeeding issues. I am grateful to Dr Paul Slack for bringing Razzell's work to my attention.

⁸⁴ Cf. above, n. 56, and also Parke, T. H., My Personal Experiences in Equatorial Africa (London, 1889), 28–9.Google Scholar

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